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 world travel (230+ countries/territories visited). She was given a camera and crayons at 3 and exposed to California motifs: light, trees, the ocean, music, and vernacular architecture that defined/influenced her left-handed aesthetic.
Early on she was 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, LACMA, and MOCA; listed in Who’s Who of Professional Women, Best Contemporary Visual Artists Worldwide Guide & Cat. Vol. 2, ArtTour Magazine (NY), Artist Talk Magazine (UK), Lens Magazine, etc.
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 100+ galleries/museums with over 500+ exhibitions in London, Rome, Berlin, Glasgow, Budapest, Athens, Prague, Paris, Barcelona, Florence, Venice, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo - California to New York - winning 410+ first and other awards: Exposure One Awards, Australian Mono Awards, Refocus Awards, Black & White SPIDER Awards, 21st Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Abstract and in Architecture categories, Botticelli International Prize in Florence, LA Art Show 2024, 17th Annual Color Awards, in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Art Expos in Basel and Paris and in Armenian Modern Art Museum in Yerevan.