Sebnem Timur Ogut was born in Ankara in 1974. She graduated from the Department of Industrial Design at METU in 1994 and received her degrees of MFA  (1996) and Ph.D. (2001) from Bilkent University, Department of Graphic Design. She has worked as a research assistant at METU in the Department of Industrial Design, and has conducted a post-doctoral study as an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London in the Department of Anthropology, Material Culture (2002-2003). She is currently teaching at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Industrial Design; her research interests mainly concentrate on  design and particularly objects as cultural phenomena at the intersection point of semiotics, material culture and visual culture studies.