About
Through a range of photographic media Karlic creates work that the intersection of photography and documentary practices, with a focus on systems of labor and industry, globalization, and their impact on the social and environmental landscapes. Karlic has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies, and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cultural Exchange International Fellowship of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Fellowship, the Hellman Fellowship, the Sacatar Foundation Residency Program, and Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program, amongst others. Karlic’s photography has been published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, Artforum, Juxtapoz Magazine, Society of Photographic Education, IMA Japanese Magazine, Marie Claire UK, and others.
Her research is dedicated to telling the stories of those persons and environs affected by the post-modernization of the industrial world. Through the use of documentary art practice as a research method rather than an artistic style, her work seeks to better understand societal, environmental, and industrial constructs by critically making visual notes of them. Karlic’s work invites viewers into a space where historical consciousness is critical to reflecting on our relationship to consumption by questioning photography’s limitations, engaging contemporary concerns around the social impact of art, and elaborating on the distinctions between art and lived experience.
In her research, Rubberlands, a photographic survey that maps the ways natural rubber manufacturing is socially, ecologically and systemically formed, Karlic proposes that rubber + photography are both integral components of the second phase of the industrial revolution. This research proposes that each are equal players in the development of a globalized contemporary mobile society of making and consuming.
Karolina Karlic is the founding director of, Unseen California, a research initiative that serves as a centralizing hub for arts+science+humanities research that aims to build upon and extend academic led arts research, education and student work in outdoor California classroom laboratories across the UC Natural Reserve System through an interdisciplinary arts approach to visualizing the environmental and social concerns of the California Landscape in the 21st Century. Unseen California is a site-specific research initiative for field-based arts research, teaching and learning, public programming, and the creation of artworks that address California’s cultural histories and ecological landscapes.
Academic roles:
University of California, Santa Cruz, Associate Professor Karolina Karlic is the inaugural Art + Science Director of the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History. As the Art + Science Faculty Director of the Norris Center, Karlic implements and mentors undergraduate and graduate student fellowships across the arts and sciences as scholars in residence and works closely with the UCSC Amah Mutsun Relearning Program to foster arts programming with the Amah Mutsun tribe through community engaged art and botanical workshops and public art exhibitions.
In 2020 Karlic cofounded Unseen California, a multi-pronged arts research initiative utilizing the University of California Natural Reserve System (UCNRS) seeded by “PlaceMakers: UC Place-based Art + Design” MPRI planning grant.
Karlic is a contributing author and faculty designer of the UCSC Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA program that launched in 2021 and the UCSC Arts Division’s Creative Technologies online BA program the first of its kind at any UC campus launched in fall 2024.
Karlic currently serves as the UCSC Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA (EASP MFA Program) Director of Graduate Studies.
Affiliations:
Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History
Environmental Art + Social Practice M.F.A. Program, Art Department UCSC
Social Documentation M.F.A. Program, Film and Digital Media Department UCSC
Education:
M.F.A., Photography and Integrated Media, California Institute of the Arts
B.F.A., Photography, Minneapolis College of Art and Design
photograph by: Mark Armijo McKnight
Background:
Karlic was born in Wrocław, Poland in 1983 and immigrated to Detroit, Michigan in 1987. She holds a M.F.A.in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied with Allan Sekula, Harry Gamboa Jr., Leigh Ledare, Ashely Hunt, David Bunn, Ellen Birrell, and Andrew Freeman. From 2013-2016 she assisted with the organization of her late mentor’s studio archive (Sekula) in preparation for a Getty Research Institute acquisition. Karlic holds a B.F.A. (2005) from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she studied with Katherine Turczan, Vince Leo, David Goldes, and Alec Soth.