Karen Safer
Artist Bio
Karen Safer is an international, award-winning photographic artist and poet with a musical bent. A Los Angeles native, born to creative, scholarly-minded parents who encouraged her world travel (230+ countries/territories visited).
Early on, she was greatly influenced by movies, music, books, and plays, and as a student of art and history, inspired by ancients to moderns – Assyria to Cindy Sherman. She has a bachelor's/master’s degree in Art from UCLA and California State University. She is a member of the Los Angeles Art Association, IAA-USA, Women United, Praxis Gallery, LACMA, MOCA, IAA-USA, in Who’s Who of Professional Women, ArtTour Magazine (NY), AATOLAU interview, Artist Talk Magazine (UK), etc. She was given a camera and crayons at 3 and exposed to/inspired by California motifs: light, trees, the ocean, music, and vernacular architecture that defined/influenced her left-handed aesthetic. She began taking pictures of family and friends, progressing from painting to developing black-and-white photos in college. She was fortunate to begin a life of travel as a teen that shaped her love of the exotic paired with an eye for the formal, accidental, and unusual while subliminally seeking the “beautiful” that jiggles the lens/frame of my eye.
She is featured in magazines, catalogs, and books and exhibited internationally in over 75+ galleries/museums with over 340+ exhibitions from London, Rome, Berlin, Glasgow, Budapest, Athens, Prague, Paris, Barcelona, Florence, Venice, Sao Paulo, from California to New York, winning 300+ First and other awards – most recently: Black & White SPIDER Awards nominee, First prizes in 21st Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Abstract and in Architecture categories, Botticelli International Prize in Florence, LA Art Show 2024 and soon in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Art Expos in Basel and Armenian Modern Art Museum in Yerevan.
"A photographer has the whole world big or small to capture." - kjs