About

Karen Stephens is an Australian artist b. Townsville,1974 and based in Guwu/ Koa Country, Winton Queensland. The context of ‘regional’ drives Stephen’s artistic practice which examines the politics of the gaze and distorts structures of seeing through contemporary landscape and portraiture painting. Her artistic modes record, disrupt and examine cultural constraints and perspectives using painting’s non-verbal cues. Stephens completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art (2017).

Stephens won the Flying Arts Alliance’s Queensland Regional Art Awards in 2016 and the Remote Artist Award in 2024. Her unique artworks have featured in curated exhibitions locally and internationally, published essays, shortlisted in national art prizes, pushed boundaries in artist run initiative programmes and scaled to billboard size arts infrastructure projects across Queensland and the Northern Territory. Stephens is one in three Central Queensland artists to receive a placemaking commission for an inaugural exhibition at the Rockhampton Museum of Art (2022) and selected as one of twelve emerging and established essay writers from across Australia to be included in the peer-contribution collection publication made possible with funding from the Gordon Darling Foundation.