About

Lauren Karp is a Nashville-based photographer and public artist with installations in permanent collections including Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her IMAGINATURE™ images are abstract works exploring nature, transformation and time. She brings her still images to life by setting them to movement and original music. Karp’s work invites viewers to see the beauty around us in new and exciting ways.

Lauren has always had a genuine connection to the natural world. Growing up in the bucolic countryside of Pennsylvania, she spent her childhood playing in lush farmlands and beside meandering streams. Amid this backdrop, she was drawn to art at a very young age and experimented in self-taught artistic endeavors using as many media as possible. At the age of 8, she trained herself in calligraphy, and continues to practice decorative lettering to this day. At age 13, she began custom-painting sneakers to earn spending money, and at 19, Lauren launched Just 4 U Apparel, a wholesale hand-painted clothing business, which paid for her college education.

Lauren attended Temple University (BBA Marketing + Management, 1989), and upon graduation pursued a decade-long career in the art publishing industry. She began as a Product Manager, buying art and photography for a global fine art print and poster company, and rose to the rank of Art Director for North America. It was then that she was inspired by world-renowned artists and photographers to return to her own forms of artistic expression. While raising two children, Lauren integrated her knowledge of calligraphy and art direction in her business, Lauren Karp Creative. Using new technology and digital tools enabled her to design distinctive invitations for hundreds of events.

Collectively, these formative experiences nurtured her creative process. Lauren’s love of art and nature and her passion for photography converged in 2011, sparking her journey to capture images of wildlife in their habitats. In developing her craft, Lauren took hundreds of thousands of photos while hiking on diverse terrain in varied locations. The challenge of photographing a subject in motion in a picturesque environment all merging into a unique moment in time inspired her to continue creating new bodies of work. She began showing and selling her photographs to collectors in 2018.

Influenced by ever-changing surroundings and seasonality, Lauren expanded her vision beyond the realism featured in her wildlife portfolio and began experimenting with abstract landscape photography. In this she found a connection to the earth’s heartbeat, and a way to express the beauty, energy, and light she sees through her lens. Paying homage to her earlier work and to evoke a sense of time and place, she began layering photos of animals and flowers onto their abstract origins. Lauren coined the term IMAGINATURE™ to describe the fleeting essence of a moment captured and reinvented with her mind’s eye. Her process evolved further as she transformed each original to form a myriad of colorful patterned pieces, and the IMAGINATURE™ Collection was born. Lauren’s vision expanded to include bringing her still photographs to life through audiovisual performances incorporating images that transform through movement, accompanied by original musical compositions. Her IMAGINATURE in Motion™ productions represent the kinetic ebb and flow of the world around us.

Lauren began losing her hearing over 25 years ago.  Without her hearing aids, she lives in a world with little to no sound.  As an artist with hearing loss, she finds that her visual perception is heightened.  This influences Lauren’s work by enabling her to capture the beauty she sees in the world and to express it through her artwork.

Karp’s work can be found in private and public collections in the US and abroad. Several of her multi-piece installations are included in Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s permanent collection including three installations in the Main Hospital Lobby.