Mehmet-Ali Ataç studied architecture, art history, and archaeology, earning his Ph.D. from Harvard Unviersity, Massachusetts in 2003. He was Whiting Post-doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University, New Jersey (2003–2004) and Hetty Goldman Member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2010–11). From 2004 to 2015, he taught at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. A scholar of the art of the ancient Near East, he is the author of The Mythology of Kingship in Neo-Assyrian Art (Cambridge, 2010).