Cenk Kadir Uygur (born March 21, 1970) is a Turkish-American left-wing political activist, media host, and attorney. He is the co-creator of The Young Turks, a progressive and a left-wing populist sociopolitical news and commentary program.

Born in Istanbul, Uygur moved from Turkey to the United States in 1978 and, in 1996, worked briefly as an associate attorney. He launched and began hosting The Young Turks in 2002. In 2011, he worked briefly for MSNBC as a political commentator (he was replaced by Al Sharpton), and then from 2011 to 2013, he appeared on a weeknight commentary show on Current TV. In 2017, Uygur co-founded the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats.

In 2020, Uygur was a candidate in the Nonpartisan primary for both the special election as well as the regularly scheduled election for California's 25th congressional district. Some of his Democrat adversaries in both elections declared his candidacy to be controversial due to past comments he allegedly made about women and minority groups, including the LGBTQ+ community, religious Jews, and Muslims, which some found offensive but which Uygur said were taken out of context. He lost both elections, placing fourth overall and second among Democrats after receiving six and seven percent of the vote, respectively.

Uygur announced his candidacy in the 2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries in October 2023 to pressure President Biden to withdraw, despite not being a natural-born U.S. citizen as required, claiming that the courts could overturn the requirement. Uygur suspended his campaign on March 6, 2024.

Cenk Kadir Uygur was born in Istanbul to a wealthy Turkish family. His mother's maiden name was Yavaşça, and his father, Doğan, started life as a rural olive and grape farmer in Kilis, a city in southern Turkey near the Syrian border, later winning a scholarship to a technical university in Istanbul, becoming a mechanical engineer, and starting a company. The family emigrated to the United States when Cenk was eight years old, and there Doğan worked as a commercial real estate developer. He spent the remainder of his upbringing in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and graduated from East Brunswick High School. Uygur was raised in a secular Muslim household, but became more religious during college. He says that he then became agnostic, and is now a "stone-cold atheist", although he still identifies as a cultural Muslim.

Although a D in high school calculus almost kept Uygur out, he transferred into the undergraduate Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in management and graduated in 1992. There, he wrote a school paper column in 1991 in which he criticized affirmative action for blacks and other minorities. He also criticized campus feminists for "making Anita Hill their patron saint" and made disparaging comments about women and said that the discussion about rape on campus was making men afraid.

Representing the Turkish Students Association on the university's Student Activities Council, Uygur argued against a $228 allocation to the Armenian Club in the council budget; council members overwhelmingly voted against him, and uncharacteristically applauded after his defeat was announced. In November 1991, he wrote an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian titled "Historical Fact or Falsehood?", in which he denied the Armenian genocide and asserted: "The claims of an Armenian genocide are not based on historical facts. If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place." He has since recanted these statements and reversed his position. He received a Juris Doctor Law degree from Columbia Law School.

Uygur worked briefly in 1996 as an associate attorney. He practiced first at the law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath in Washington, D.C., and then at Hayes & Liebman in New York City.