Thursday, February 26 at 4:45 PM. Gilman Auditorium, Hood Museum.
Karin is a nationally recognized public art leader who has shaped Boston’s civic landscape for nearly two decades. From 2008 to 2025, she led the City of Boston’s public art initiatives across four mayoral administrations, serving as the City’s first Director of Public Art, Director of the Boston Art Commission, and, most recently, Director of Transformative Art and Monuments in the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture.
Karin set the vision and direction for Boston’s public art program, building policies, funding strategies, and cross-departmental partnerships that have institutionalized and sustained the field citywide. She has overseen the acquisition and stewardship of more than 500 artworks across Boston’s neighborhoods and created transparent, accessible processes that support artists while strengthening public trust.
A defining achievement of her tenure was securing a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project to launch Un-monument | Re-monument | De-Monument: Transforming Boston—a citywide, multimedia initiative reimagining commemoration and fostering inclusive public dialogue. Her leadership builds on earlier monument work, including commissioning a national audit of monument practices and guiding robust public processes that led to the peaceful removal of two monuments in 2020. She also co-led the public art process for The Embrace, Boston’s most significant contemporary monument.
Karin founded several cornerstone programs that expanded opportunities for artists, including PaintBox, Transformative Public Art, the Percent for Art program embedding in municipal capital projects, and the nationally recognized Boston Artists-in-Residence program. Collectively, these initiatives have directed millions of dollars to artists and permanently integrated public art into Boston’s civic infrastructure.
With an MBA from MIT, a Master’s in Education from Harvard, and an AB from Dartmouth College, Karin combines policy expertise, creative vision, and operational leadership to advance public art as a powerful civic asset.