Karen Marshall

Photographer Karen Marshall documents social issues. By focusing on the psychological lives of her subjects, she has worked on a series of visual stories that often deliberate familial relationships, womanhood, and meanings found in the fabric of belonging to community.

Marshall’s seminal project Between Girls published as a book in 2021 (Kehrer Verlag), articulates the coming of age of a group of New York City teenagers, following them from high school into adulthood 30 years later.

In her visual journey Marshall has witnessed the struggling identity of a group of Navajo Indians and the demise of their earth-based culture in Caretakers of the Earth: Navajo Resistance.  Often deliberating the theater of familial clan relationships Pennsylvania In-Laws, Still, Standing, In-Family, and I Want This Enlarged draw on her own family history. Her most recent work Mother Vein is archival reconstruction utilizing the assemblage of own archive dating back to age 13 and considers the complexity of being female while in relationship with her camera.

Marshall is the recipient of artist fellowships and sponsorships through the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as grants and support from private foundations. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2011, her work is part of several collections, including the Feminist Artbase at The Brooklyn Museum. Her work has been widely exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States, Germany, Austria, Canada, Israel, the Philippines, China and Colombia. Her photographs have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, the London Sunday Times, I-D Vice, NPR Picture Show, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, Fisheye, and GUP Magazine to name a few.

Marshall is the Chair of the one-year Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism Program at The International Center of Photography in New York City where she has been on the faculty for over three decades. She is an associate professor (adjunct) at New York University, mentors MFA candidates at the Maine Media Workshops and College in Rockport, Maine, and has taught numerous workshops internationally that focus on visual storytelling.

She has a BA in Photography from Hampshire College and an MFA from Transart Institute, Donau Universität.