Karyn Olivier, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations and public art. In 2024, Olivier participated in the Whitney Biennial, Prospect.6 Triennial, the Malta Biennale, and unveiled a memorial honoring a formerly enslaved servant in Philadelphia. This year, she will unveil a memorial, commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground. In 2023, she presented her second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. In 2022, she participated in Documenta 15 and installed a permanent commission at Newark Airport.

Olivier has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan biennials, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Mattress Factory, SculptureCenter, and ICA Watershed (Boston), among others. Solo exhibitions include Everything That’s Alive Moves at ICA Philadelphia, and A Closer Look at Laumeier Sculpture Park (St. Louis).

Olivier has received numerous awards, including the 2020 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a PEW Fellowship, a NYFA Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and a Creative Capital award.

Olivier’s work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Art in America, Mousse, The Washington Post, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Frieze, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Hyperallergic, among others. She is a sculpture professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.