Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/ College/ Unit Art Department

Title Associate Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Kenneth S Norris Center for Natural History

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Art Photography/Photography as Critical Practice
Environmental Art
Social Documentation
Globalization
Labor and Social Movements
Climate Change
Natural History

Web Site

Primary Office Location Digital Arts Research Center
239

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours By Appointment.

Mail Stop Art Department

Biography, Education and Training

Karolina Karlic is a visual artist and Associate Professor of Art at UC Santa Cruz working across photography, moving image, and documentary practices. Her research examines intersections of labor, industry, ecology, and the environmental and social impacts of globalization, with particular attention to how systems of production transform human lives, landscapes, and more-than-human environments.

Her long-term project, Rubberlands, is an expansive photographic survey tracing the global systems of natural rubber production and circulation. Developed through research across multiple geographies, the project examines how rubber production has been socially organized, ecologically constructed, and economically sustained. Situating natural rubber within the second phase of the industrial revolution, Rubberlands considers rubber and photography as materially and historically intertwined technologies within the formation of a globalized mobile society structured by production and consumption.

Karlic’s recent work expands these concerns through sustained, place-based research focused on photography’s relationship to landscape, ecology, and environmental change. Working across photography, moving image, print, and installation, she approaches fieldwork as a long-term process of observation and return, considering how images can register relationships among place, time, human activity, and more-than-human life.

Karlic is Founding Director of Unseen California, an interdisciplinary research initiative established to reconsider how contemporary photography might engage California landscapes through sustained, place-based inquiry. Working across UC Nature reserves, Unseen California creates opportunities for photographers to conduct long-term research alongside scientists, land stewards, educators, and communities, approaching these sites as both ecological and cultural terrain.

At UC Santa Cruz, Karlic serves as Faculty Director of Art + Science Initiatives at the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History. She is also Principal Investigator of the University of California Climate Action Arts Network (UC CAAN), an eight-campus research network bringing together arts, ecology, climate research, public engagement, and community partnerships. UC CAAN is supported by the University of California Office of the President through the Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) program.

Karlic has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, Hellman Fellowship, Sacatar Fellowship, and Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship.

Awards, Honors and Grants

* abbreviated 

Rydell Visual Arts Fellow (2026)
UC Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) Grant, UC Climate Action Arts Network (UC CAAN), Principal Investigator (2025-2027)
Hellman Fellow (2019)
Department of Cultural Affairs Los Angeles, Cultural Exchange Fellow (2015)
Artist in Residence: Sacatar Foundation, Bahia, Brazil (2014)
Artist in Residence: Light Work, Syracuse, New York (2013)
Guggenheim Fellow: Creative Arts, Photography (2011)