Karen Dunn

Karen L. Dunn is a filmmaker, activist, and educator — and the recipient of Pratt Institute’s Distinguished Teacher Award for 2026–27. Her practice moves between documentary film, print culture, and sustainability advocacy. She holds an MFA in Video/Installation Arts from the University of North Carolina, an MA in Integrated Media and Performance from the Banff Centre for the Fine Arts, and a BA in Motion Picture Studies from UCLA.

As co-founder of No Kill: Project Planet, her nonprofit challenges extractive fashion culture through publication, street campaigns, zines, and public intervention. No Kill magazine, its publishing arm, is a member of the UN Fashion and Lifestyle Network.

Her most recent film, The Elephant (in my Room), follows Barbara Greene Mann — a painter who emerged from Detroit’s Cass Corridor in the 1980s, disappeared from the art world, and was rediscovered three decades later as a consequential figure in Toronto’s (dis)ability art scene. The film premiered at the Detroit Institute of Arts in October 2025. Its companion monograph, Strange Beauty (Wayne State University Press, 2025), co-edited with Caroline Maun and designed by Lorraine Wild, gathers Mann’s art alongside essays by those who knew her work and her world.

Since 2015, Dunn has taught Thesis Research, Design Writing, and Sustainability in the Graduate Communications Design program at Pratt, where she serves as Thesis Affinity Group Leader. What happens in one of her classes, she says, “can’t be replicated even by me — born of unexpected encounters, of who washes up and what they carry.”