Özge Samancı

She won a 2017 Berlin Prize and 2020 Distinguished Alumna Award from Georgia Institute of Technology.

In 2017, Samanci won the Berlin Prize with her graphic novel project Not Here but Everywhere. Her graphic novel Dare to Disappoint won a Middle East award and 30th Annual New York Book Show Award and she was a guest at the Berlin Literature Festival.

She is the author of Dare to Disappoint (Farrar Straux Giroux, 2015), an autobiographical graphic novel.

Dare to Disappoint is Ozge Samanci's graphic coming-of-age memoir. Her story takes place after the third military coup leading to Turkey's rapid change to neo-capitalism from 1980 to 2000. After going through the struggle of obtaining a degree in mathematics to please her father and society, she becomes a cartoonist and artist. The book was translated into five languages. Her drawings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Slate Magazine, The Huffington Post, Guernica, and The Rumpus. Samanci also runs Ordinary Things, an online comics journal with more than 2,000 comic-collage images depicting her daily observations.

Özge Samancı (born 21 July 1975 in İzmir) is a Turkish American artist, and professor at Northwestern University. She creates media art installations and graphic novels. Her art installations merge computer code and bio-sensors with comics, animation, interactive narrations, performance, and projection art. Her installations use media arts to break down people's mental and emotional barriers and hear about environmental issues. Her graphic novels combine drawings with three-dimensional objects.

Ozge Samanci was born in 1975.  The daughter of two teachers, she grew up in the coastal city of Izmir, at a time when Turkey was under the control of a military dictatorship.