Esmeray Özadikti

Esmeray Zeynep Özatik (born 1973) is a theatre actress, columnist, and LGBT activist.^[1]

When she Özatik was 15, she moved with her family from Kars to Istanbul. She took theatre, Turkish and Kurdish lessons at Mesopotamia Cultural Center.^[2] In 2009, she play in two different adaptations of Dario Fo's play The Rape, one of which included elements from her own experience of rape.^[3] She was a cast and crew member of the play Yazmadan Dökülenler, which was performed at Amargi Theatre and told the story of 13 women who migrated to a big city.^[4] She later went one to act in Cadının Bohçası, the story of a transsexual woman who moves from Kars to Istanbul, which was inspired by her own life. In its second part, Yırtık Bohça, she used a one-person narrative^[5] to what people with different sexual identities were exposed to. She later turned her life during her period of sex reassignment surgery into a play called Kestirmeden Hikayeler.^[6]

At the First Congress of the People's Democratic Party in October 2013, she succeeded in joining the Party Assembly.^[7]