Congratulations to our Assoc. Prof. Ilgım Veryeri Alaca (Media and Visual Arts) and former graduates Birce Özkan and Betül Gaye Dinç for sharing their work with scholars from over 33 countries via Zoom at Fostering Dialogue Conference organized by the University of Padua, extending the depth and breadth of teaching, production and research in relation to children’s books.

For more details about the online event, please visit here.

Brief information about our team;

Ilgım Veryeri Alaca is a faculty member at Koç University, Department of Media and Visual Arts. She earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ph.D. from Hacettepe University. Her articles appeared in Bookbird, Leonardo, International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction and International Journal of Education through Art. She contributed to The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks and The Routledge International Handbook of Early Literacy Education. She presented in conferences such as IRSCL, IBBY, NordiCHI and IDC (International Conference on Interaction Design and Children). She edited a special issue on the materiality of picturebooks in Libri & Liberi Journal in 2019.

Birce Özkan is a Designer and technologist working at the intersection of interaction design, fashion design, and wearable technologies. A former graduate of Koç University, she earned her MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York where she taught classes. Her work has been exhibited internationally at SXSW, la Gaîté Lyrique Paris, Interlaced London, NYC Media Lab, Engadget Expand and New York Fashion Week and has been published in VICE, Observer, Fast Company, Dezeen, Designboom, PSFK, Voici, Huffington Post, and Discovery Channel. She has won several awards including ISWC Japan Jury Award and Unilever New York Fellowship.

Betül Gaye Dinç is a graduate student at Erasmus Mundus International Master in Children’s Literature, Media, and Culture at the University of Glasgow. She obtained her B.A. in Archaeology and Art History with a double major in English Language and Comparative Literature and received her M.A. in Design, Technology, and Society from Koç University. She contributed to the edited volumes, Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks (2021) and VEKAM Cultural Heritage Studies for Children (0-18) Workshops (2020). She published in Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice and Studies in Comics. She has work experience in the Women’s Museum Istanbul, Project 4/L Elgiz Contemporary Art Museum and Pera Museum Learning Programs.