Karen Safer is an international, award-winning photographic artist and poet with musical bent. Los Angeles native, born to creative, scholarly-minded parents who encouraged world travel (230+ countries/territories visited). Early on, she was greatly influenced by movies, music, books, plays, and as 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, Artist Talk Magazine (UK), Lens Magazine, 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 90+ galleries/museums with over 430+ exhibitions from London, Rome, Berlin, Glasgow, Budapest, Athens, Prague, Paris, Barcelona, Florence, Venice, Sao Paulo, Tokyo - California to New York, winning 380+ First and other awards – most recently: Australian Mono Awards, Refocus Awards, Black & White SPIDER Awards nominee, 21st Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Abstract and in Architecture categories, Botticelli International Prize in Florence, LA Art Show 2024, 17th Annual Color Awards 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