About

Karen Treanor is a media artist and photographer whose work is characterized by a keen sense of whimsy and mystery.

Treanor’s videos have been screened at Anthology Film Archives, NYU’s Skirball Center and The Phatory Gallery in New York’s East Village. Her first video, “Private Conversation,” received the “Best Debut Award” in 2001 at the New York Expo of Film and Video, a festival she later led as Executive Director. While working as the Editor of a newsletter at the United Nations, Treanor filmed and edited the documentary, “Afghan Women Speak!” (2002), which was distributed to more than 1,000 Unitarian Universalist congregations in the United States and Canada. She generally prefers using older digital equipment for its hazy, granular, decidedly non-HD effects, and her editing style is marked by a lyrical ease.

In her photographic work, Treanor uses traditional, analog techniques, such as photogravure, kallitype, cyanotype and platinum/palladium printing, in addition to silver-gelatin methods. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she studied silver-gelatin and alternative photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City. Her cameras are almost exclusively twin-lens, reflex, medium-format Rolleiflex models manufactured in the 1960s.

Karen Treanor holds a PhD (abd) in English Literature from New York University, where she taught for several years. Her poetry has been honored with 2 awards from the Academy of American Poets, and her scholarly writing includes a study of the 16th-Century, Hindu jester, Birbal, published by Greenwood Press. Click here.  

She lives in New York City and oversees the estate of her late husband, Filmmaker/Photographer Jim Jennings.