KARYN OLIVIER, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations and public art.  This year, Olivier will unveil a Philadelphia memorial, commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground. Last year, she participated in the Whitney Biennial (NY, NY), La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio (NY, NY), the Malta Biennale (Valleta, Malta), and Prospect.6 Triennial (New Orleans, LA). In 2024, Olivier also unveiled a memorial honoring a formerly enslaved servant and was selected to create a public installation in Milwaukee, memorializing Vel R. Phillips, the late politician, attorney, judge, and civil rights activist. In 2023, Olivier presented her second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. In 2022 Olivier participated in Documenta 15 and installed a permanent commission for Newark Airport’s Terminal A.

Olivier has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan biennials (South Korea), the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), SculptureCenter (New York), ICA Watershed Boston, among others. Solo exhibitions include Everything That’s Alive Moves at Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2020), and A Closer Look at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis (2007). 

Olivier has received numerous awards, including a 2025 USA Fellowship, a 2020 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the 2018–2019 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a 2019 PEW Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock- Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, a Creative Capital Foundation grant, and a Harpo Foundation grant.

Olivier’s work has been reviewed inArtForum,The New York Times; Time Out New York; The Village Voice; Art in America; Flash Art; Mousse; The Washington Post; Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art; Frieze;thePhiladelphia InquirerandHyperallergic, among others. She is a sculpture professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.