Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit Art Department

Title Associate Professor, Head of Photography, Director of Graduate Studies: Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA, Director of Art + Science Research at the Norris Center for Natural History, Founding Director: Unseen California

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Kenneth S Norris Center for Natural History
Environmental Studies Department
Film and Digital Media Department

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Art Photography/Photography as Critical Practice
Globalization
Environmental Art
Climate Change
Social Documentation
Visual Arts

Web Site

Primary Office Location Digital Arts Research Center
DARC # 239

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours email to set up appointment

Mail Stop Art Department

Biography, Education and Training

Karolina Karlic is a visual artist working across photography and documentary practices to examine the intersections of labor, industry, and the environmental and social impacts of globalization. Her work investigates how post-industrial systems shape human lives and ecologies within global production networks.

Her research documents the social and ecological transformations produced by industrial modernization. Her seminal project, Rubberlands, is an expansive photographic survey mapping the global systems of natural rubber production and circulation. The work examines how rubber manufacturing has been socially organized, ecologically constructed, and economically sustained across geographies. Situating natural rubber within the second phase of the industrial revolution, Rubberlands establishes rubber and photography as materially and historically intertwined technologies—co-constitutive forces in the formation of a globalized mobile society structured by production and consumption.

Karlic has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

She is the founding director of Unseen California, an artist-led research initiative engaging the University of California Natural Reserve System. At UC Santa Cruz, she serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA Program and as Faculty Director of Art + Science Initiatives at the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History.

She serves as Principal Investigator and co-lead of the University of California Climate Action Arts Network (UC CAAN), a systemwide, multicampus initiative co-led by arts faculty across the University of California. UC CAAN brings together researchers, scholars, students, and community partners to address the climate crisis through arts-based research, collaboration, and public engagement. The initiative is supported by the University of California Office of the President through the Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) program.

Awards, Honors and Grants

* abbreviated 

University of California Office of the President Multi-Campus: UC Climate Action Arts Network (2025)

Fellowship: Hellman Fellow (2019-2020)

Fellowship: Department of Cultural Affairs Los Angeles, Cultural Exchange Artist between Los Angeles /Brazil. (2015)

Artist in Residence: Sacatar Foundation, Bahia, Brazil (2014)

Artist in Residence: Light Work, Syracuse, New York (2013)

Guggenheim Fellowship: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Creative Arts: Photography (2011-2012)