Esin Atıl


Esin Atıl was a Turkish-American historian of Islamic art and curator of Islamic art at the Freer Gallery of Art.

Education

Esin Atıl graduated from the American College for Girls in Istanbul 1956 with BA degree. She received a second BA degree from the Western College for Women in 1958 and continued to graduate-level studies at the University of Michigan. Atıl received her Ph.D. in 1969 with a thesis titled Surname-i Vehbi: An Eighteenth Century Ottoman Book of Festivals under the supervision of Oleg Grabar.

Career

Subsequent to her graduation, Atıl was appointed in 1970 to the position of the curator of Near Eastern Art at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Until her retirement in 1993, she remained in charge of the Islamic art collections of the Freer Gallery and, after its founding in 1987, of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Her career is marked by a series of seminal and groundbreaking exhibitions of Islamic art, almost all of them accompanied by authoritative exhibition catalogues.
A specialist in the history of Ottoman art, Esin Atıl was the curator for the first major exhibition of the subject held at the National Gallery of Art in 1987. The exhibition was acclaimed as a milestone event, receiving both positive academic reviews and news coverage. The success of this exhibition especially led her to receive an honorary doctorate degree in 1987 from Boğaziçi University, citing her important contributions to the study of Turkish culture and history by means of seminal exhibitions and publications. In the same year, she also received the Grand Award for Culture and Art from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Turkey.