The international career of Celile Berk Butka (1915, Istanbul-1984, New York City), the first woman architect-engineer from Istanbul Technical University, her master’s thesis at MIT in 1946-1947, and her professional career in Detroit and New York City (1959-1972) fill a significant gap in the field, and offers the potential to stimulate new scholarly studies on women architects from Turkey, a modern, secular and Muslim-majority country in the Middle East; or other countries with the similar architectural and cultural characteristics and their alternative career paths. Although the postwar period witnessed a new and international self-image of Turkish women architects unlike the official ideology of the country in the making of modern woman as a nationally constructed icon in the 1930s, why are their inspiring career stories still invisible in the established history of architecture? Turkish women architects of the postwar generation redefined not only stereotypes associated with Turkish women but also the stereotypes that women architects should specialize in “women’s fields” such as housing projects, domestic architecture and interior decoration. As the first woman architect-engineer graduate of the Istanbul Technical University (1942), one of the oldest and leading universities in the Republic of Turkey, Celile Berk Butka and her international scope challenge gender stereotypes in modern Turkish architecture merits scholarly attention. This paper is based on archival research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the American Institute of Architects, the Women’s Museum Istanbul, and relevant personal archives, as well as semi-structured interviews and a close reading on relevant published architectural and scholarly essays, books on Turkish women architects of the postwar generation, and on women architects in the US in between the 1940s-the 1960s. Celile Berk Butka is not only the first woman engineer-architect graduated from Istanbul Technical University in 1942, but she also opened a new path for the next generation of women architects from postwar Turkey to the international world.