Born in Istanbul, İpek Altınbaşak-Farina studied at Notre Dame De Sion and received her BA degree in Business Administration from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey and her MBA from West Georgia University in the United States.
After her return to Turkey, she joined Unilever and started working as Senior Brand Manager between 1992 -1996, where she created and carried out a nation-wide PR campaign, namely Rama Cansuyu Project (recipient of the 1994 United Nations’ Project Award). Altınbaşak-Farina continued her career at Komili Holding A.Ş. as the Marketing and New Product Development Manager in charge of domestic and international marketing of diverse businesses consisting of the preparation of the yearly marketing, PR and total communication strategies and implementation of them. Also, she worked as Strategy Consultant focusing on the development of the corporate communication strategies for international and national companies.
She worked as a corporate strategy and communications consultant for several years in the telecommunications, investment banking and leather industries. Furthermore, she has been giving training to the members of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, to Turkish Leather association, to TUSIAD and so on. She trained the undersecretaries working abroad for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and provincial directors. Altınbaşak-Farina is an active jury member of Advertisers’ Association, Turkish Direct Marketers Association, Turkish Packaging Association and so on.
Also, Altınbaşak-Farina was a member of the evaluation committee of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Turkey’s promotion abroad. At Turkey Tourism Forum in 2017, she was a member of the Promotion and Marketing Committee. Additionally, she directed projects on the promotion and perception of Turkey at several NGOs and institutions.
She served as the Dean of the Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences and the Strategic Marketing and Brand Management Graduate Program Coordinator. She teaches courses about marketing and strategy such as Marketing Strategy, Strategic Brand
Management, Special Topics in Marketing, and Global Marketing. Among the topics that Altınbaşak-Farina conducts research are country image/place marketing, brand management, education marketing and generation marketing.
Since Altınbaşak-Farina got her PhD in marketing from Boğaziçi University in 2004, she has been a member of the Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences at Bahcesehir University. Between 2005 and 2007, she served as the Director of the Graduate School, during which she established and directed over 20 graduate programmes.
Altınbaşak-Farina speaks fluently English, French, Italian and Turkish.