Karen is a Professor in the School of Visual Arts and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Penn State. She has received a National Art Education Foundation grant (2017-2018), a National Science Foundation grant (2010-2012), and two Fulbright Faculty Scholar grants for research in Finland and Austria, as well as other grants for research in Uganda and Ecuador. Her work focuses on transdisciplinary creativity, inclusion, eco-social justice art education, feminist art pedagogy, data visualization, transcultural dialogue, and cyberart activism. She engages in feminist theory and methodologies and creates virtual spaces to raise issues of the politics of representation, identity, and social disparity. By problematizing cultural inscriptions and highlighting contextualized signifiers that people use to invest meaning in images, she explores social and personal transformative possibilities through virtual interactive environments and 360-degree video immersive experiences. Karen would be a fantastic candidate to speak on any topics related to strategies for transcultural web-based discourse, issues of diversity, and advocacy.
