Karen K. Kosasa received a B.A. in Art from Beloit College in 1972, an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in 1983, an M.A. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in 1995, and will receive a Ph.D. from the latter institution in Spring 2002. She previously taught as an adjunct in the art departments at the University of Hawai'i and the University of Rochester, and as an Assistant Professor of Art at Boise State University. Her teaching and research projects are in visual and material culture with a special focus on issues of representation and critical pedagogy in the fine arts, popular culture, and museums. Her interest in museum studies is inspired by first-hand experience with museums, galleries, and art institutions as a practicing artist, and her interest in artists who focus on the function, collection, or space of museums. Ms. Kosasa is engaged in current discussions on the relationship between museums and the peoples represented in their collections, and efforts by museums to critically assess and reimagine their roles and responsibilities in the collection, archiving, and display of cultural artifacts.

Ms. Kosasa is involved in interdisciplinary research and influenced by the work of scholars from diverse fields: art history, cultural studies, (post)colonial theory, critical pedagogy, cultural geography, anthropology, literary criticism, and media studies. Her dissertation, "Critical Sights/Sites: Art Pedagogy and Settler Colonialism in Hawai'i" examines the teaching and learning of art within the context of colonialism in the United States and Hawai'i. In this project she weaves together discussions on visual representation, colonialism, nationalism, spatial theory, ideology and hegemony, and education, with images produced by the draftsmen on Cook's 18th century Pacific voyages, Henri Matisse's artistic sojourns in Morocco in the early 20th century, and contemporary art students and artists in Hawai'i. Ms. Kosasa's dissertation also includes an important ethnographic project in which she interviewed students and teachers in Honolulu and examined their often controversial efforts to speak to the limitations of a studio arts curriculum emphasizing Euro-American cultural schema.

Ms. Kosasa published work includes the following: "Thefts of Space and Culture," History of Photography 25, no. 3 (Autumn 2001); "Pedagogical Sights/Sites: Producing Colonialism and Practicing Art in the Pacific," Art Journal 57, no. 3 (Fall 1998); and "Effacing Specific Visions: Viewing 'Here' From 'Elsewhere,'" in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies, eds. Marilyn Alquizola, et al., (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995).

Ms. Kosasa, a third-generation Japanese-American, was born and raised in Honolulu. She is a practicing artist exhibiting two bodies of work-personal and collaborative. Since 1989, she has collaborated with Honolulu photographer, Stan Tomita. They are currently working on a long-term project on tourism and education first inspired by a postcard project they created for the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Ms. Kosasa has been involved in mixed-media installation projects since the mid-eighties. Her recent work attempts to critically reflect on her participation in the production of settler colonialism in the United States, the colonization of Native peoples, and the expropriation of their land.

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