Karen Schiff uses her background as an English professor, and an emphasis on direct experience cultivated through sitting meditation, to create works about text and texture. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and her studies in high school and college (Brown University, A.B. in Comparative Literature and A.M. in English, 1989) combined studio art and literature.  After spending three years in Colorado, she returned to graduate school (University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, 1998), where she began to combine the two fields by studying the visual composition of novels.  After five years as an English professor, she returned to art school (School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University, M.F.A., 2006), where her work explored visual manifestations of writing and printed texts, and investigated concrete infrastructures -- such as a room’s physical layout, or a paper’s manufacture -- that inform ordinary consciousness.

Over the past five years, Schiff’s work has been exhibited at the Katonah Art Museum, the Museum of the University of Richmond, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, Spain.  She has shown full projects in New York at Danese Gallery (2010) and Jason Rulnick Gallery (2007), and elsewhere at Waypoint Gallery (Marfa, TX) and the Flanagan Gallery at the Community College of Rhode Island (Lincoln Campus). Residencies include Yaddo, Anderson Ranch, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Harwood Museum of Art, the Jentel Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, for which she received an Artist's Fellowship.  Schiff’s artwork has won prizes in exhibitions and from her graduate school faculty, and it is held in public and private collections in the U.S. and in Europe.