Meet the Artist
Ezgi Iraz is the founder of Studio Kōlea, a visual artist and storyteller whose work centers on love, rest as resistance, and cultural remembrance.
Based in Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, her practice explores rest as a birthright for women of color, belonging as a bridge between cultures, and the quiet power of visual storytelling through painting, photography, and community-centered projects.
Originally from Istanbul, Ezgi Iraz is a Turkish American whose creative journey mirrors the kōlea bird, the Pacific Golden Plover, whose seasonal flight carries it across oceans and always returns. Her path has taken her from design studios across Europe to the islands of Hawaiʻi, where she now creates work that holds memory, tenderness, and return.
An award-winning creative art director, Ezgi Iraz, spent decades shaping visual narratives in European advertising. She studied in Milano and worked throughout Denmark, before relocating to Hawaiʻi as Creative Art Director at LEGO in Billund, at the heart of the company’s global headquarters.
During her time at LEGO, Ezgi Iraz broke barriers in advertising representation, bringing a perspective that challenged industry norms. She created LEGO’s first campaign centering children of color, not as background figures, but as the protagonists: the smart ones, the winners, the heroes at the center of the story. This work was not simply about inclusion. It was about reshaping who gets to celebrate, see, and value their intelligence, joy, and imagination.
Through her paintings, Ezgi seeks to shift the narrative shaped by her career and imposed on women, especially women of color. She believes that rest and comfort in life are a birthright.
Resting in Muʻumuʻu
A painting series by Ezgi Iraz
Resting in Muʻumuʻu is an ongoing acrylic painting series that centers women of color and the quiet, radical act of rest. In a world that has historically extracted labor from the bodies and souls of people of color, this work honors rest as resistance, a reclaiming of time, dignity, and presence.
"I paint rest for women of color. My mother did not rest a day until she turned 70. Even now, she cannot rest—her mind tells her she is useless if she does. That mindset was shaped by the system, and it shaped me growing up.
So my paintings are reminders. They are an offering, a prayer. A reshaping of hustle culture. A declaration that women of color deserve rest. Rest is our birthright.
It might look gentle to you. It might even look naive. But with each brushstroke, I manifest rest for women. And with each painting that people look at—truly look at—I help their minds rewire. The woman of color becomes a subject of admiration not through sexualization, but through her intellect, her ease, holding a book, resting and safe, her refusal to perform.
The muʻumuʻu was brought to Hawaiʻi around the 1800s by missionaries to cover the bodies of Hawaiian wāhine. I acknowledge that the muʻumuʻu has a colonial origin. I paint women in muʻumuʻu not to erase that history, but to honor what the garment has become—a symbol reclaimed, reshaped, and loved within local culture. Complex histories deserve to be held with care, not erased.
I am a Sufi Turkish American woman of color and an artist who believes deeply in love/aşk. I'm also a devoted yoga and meditation practitioner, with over two decades of practice.
I do hope you feel all of the aşk I put in my heARTwhen you look at it."
The muʻumuʻu appears throughout this series as a symbol of comfort, femininity, and local identity, worn for ease.
Through carved tea tables, patterned rugs, and ceramic vases, Ezgi Iraz weaves together visual languages from Hawaiʻi, Ottoman heritage, and Islamic arts. Her paintings create spaces that hold memory, tenderness, and belonging across borders as a human experience of diaspora.
The Kōlea: A Name Rooted in Migration and Return
Hawaiian: Kōlea
English: Pacific Golden Plover
Turkish: Altın yağmurcunu (Pasifik altın yağmurcunu)
Sakha Turkic: Chuuskun
Studio Kōlea is named after the kōlea bird, whose annual migration across the Pacific reflects Ezgi Iraz’s own ancestral journey, from the Altai Mountains, through Istanbul, across Europe, and finally to Hawaiʻi. The kōlea does not migrate to escape. It migrates to return.
The name honors movement, memory, and belonging across cultures, languages, and oceans.
Studio Kōlea Values
Within systems built on speed, extraction, and exhaustion, other ways of being are already alive.
Studio Kōlea is grounded in rest, care, and cultural remembrance. Our work is guided by the belief that slowing down is not a failure of ambition, it is a return to balance, to breath, to what is sacred.
We create space for rest as a form of resistance, and for creativity as an act of care. Studio Kōlea honors making that is rooted in lineage, land, and lived experience, not urgency or endless extraction.
Our values are simple and intentional:
- Rest over urgency.
- Care over productivity.
- Presence over performance.
- Enough of excess.
- Cultural memory over disposability.
- Making with intention over endless output.
Studio Kōlea is a space for returning to body, to breath, to land, and to self.The future we tend is shaped by what we choose to protect with our time, our hands, and our aloha/aşk. May we protect what matters, and return to it with care.
Land Acknowledgment & Community Commitment
Studio Kōlea acknowledges that we live and work on the traditional lands of Native Hawaiians. We offer our deep respect to the poʻe kānaka maoli of this place and recognize that the ongoing presence, knowledge, and stewardship of Hawaiian and immigrant communities shape these islands culturally.
We are committed to continuous learning, accountability, and supporting local communities through care-centered, reciprocal relationships.
We already work with local nonprofits and community organizations, and if you’re one and interested in collaborating with us, we would be honored to connect.