Karen Irvine is Curator and Associate Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.
She has organized over forty exhibitions of contemporary photography, at the MoCP and other venues including the Hyde Park Art Center; Rockford Art Museum; Lishui International Photography Festival, China; Daegu Photography Biennale, South Korea, and the New York Photo Festival.
Irvine has contributed texts to many publications including FOAM, Art on Paper and Contemporary and monographs including Ann Lislegaard: Eyes Wide Open (The Royal Museum of Photography, Copenhagen); Laura Letinsky: Alone Somewhere (Galerie Kusseneers, Antwerp), Paula McCartney: Non-flights of Fancy (Princeton Architectural Press), Barbara Probst: Exposures (Steidl), Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson (MACK, 2011), and Stefan Heyne Speak to Me (Hatje Cantz, 2012), amongst others.
She has a BA in French and International Relations from Tufts University, Medford, MA, an MFA in photography from FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic, and an MA in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago.