Jean "Yanko" Varda (11 September 1893—10 January 1971) was a Turkish-born American artist, best known for his collage work.

Jean Varda was born on 11 September 1893 in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire (in present-day Izmir, Turkey).

[6] Beginning in 1923, he spent most of his summers in Cassis, in the south of France, sharing Roland Penrose's home Villa Les Mimosas, where they welcomed a number of well-known guests, including Braque, Miró, Derain, Max Ernst, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Gerald Brenan, Wolfgang Paalen, and others.

The collage, which would typically combine scraps of cloth and bits of paper with paint on a board, would remain his favored medium for the rest of his life.

[14] In 1946 Varda taught at a Summer Institute at Black Mountain College, an experimental school in rural North Carolina.

In approximately 1947,[1] Varda and British-born artist Gordon Onslow Ford acquired an old ferryboat called the Vallejo.

[18][16] Varda turned the Vallejo ferryboat into a kind of salon and he was an excellent cook and would regale guests with stories at dinners.

[18] Varda died in 1971, after suffering a heart attack upon arriving by plane in Mexico City,[20] where he had gone to visit Alice Rahon.

Before his death, in 1967, he was the subject of a short documentary film by Agnès Varda entitled "Uncle Yanco."