Altınışık was born in Sakarya in 1980 and finished top of her class at the Faculty of Architecture of Istanbul Technical University in 2003, then took a master's at the Architectural Association's Design Research Laboratory in London, completing it in 2006. Her thesis, Urban Lobby, won the FEIDAD award that year and a Swiss Arts Award in 2007. Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, who sat on her final jury, offered her a job on the spot; she spent 2006 to 2013 at Zaha Hadid Architects as a project leader, working on the Kartal-Pendik masterplan for Istanbul and on schemes in twelve countries. She returned to Turkey in 2012 to teach on the architecture master's at Istanbul Bilgi University and founded Melike Altınışık Architects in Istanbul in 2013. The Çamlıca Tower is the practice's first building; in 2019 it won the competition for the Robot Science Museum in Seoul.
