Instructor Biography

Deniz Öktem Bektaş was born in Holland in 1976. She graduated from ‘İmam-Hatip’ high school in Istanbul in 1994. After completing her studies at the Department of English Literature at Boğaziçi University, she continued her graduate work at Georgetown University in the U.S.A. While working on her master’s at the Department of Communication, Culture, and Technology, she met Mohamed Zakariya with whom she started calligraphy lessons in riq’a and naskh. Coming back to Turkey at the end of 2002, she continued to take calligraphy lessons with Hasan Çelebi and Davut Bektaş in the scripts of riq’a, naskh, and thuluth. In 2007, she obtained her ijaza in the Naskh and Thuluth scripts. She received encouragement awards in naskh at the 7th International Calligraphy Competition organized by IRCICA in 2007 and at the Calligraphy Biennial in Sharjah in 2008. In the national calligraphy competition conducted by the Presidency of Religious Affairs of Turkey (2015), she received 3rd prize in writing several pages from the Qur’an in the script of naskh. Mrs. Öktem has participated in exhibitions in Turkey and internationally, and continues her work alongside her husband, Davut Bektaş, in their studio in Istanbul.