Karen Reimer has a BA from Bethel College, Kansas, near where she grew up, and an MFA from the University of Chicago, the city where she now lives. Her work is rooted equally in the traditions of craft and the traditions of conceptual art. It has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon; Rochester Art Center, Rochester MN; School of Creative Arts, University of West England, Bristol; Wallspace, New York; Owens Art Gallery, Mt. Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago. She is a recipient of the Artadia and Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist awards, and the Women’s Caucus for Art’s President’s Award. She has also received grants from the Graham Foundation and the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design.

Her 2015 monograph, Endless, was published by Whitewalls and Gallery 400 University of Illinois, and her work is also published in Reprint: Appropriation (&) Literature, Luxbooks Gmbh; The Object of Labor, MIT Press; By Hand, Princeton Architectural Press; NOON Annual 2012, New York; and Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II, University of Minnesota Press. She is an Instructor in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Publications Director at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Her work is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.