Karen Zusman is a New York-based photographer, poet, and educator whose work explores the space between how we see others and how they understand themselves. Working across portraiture, documentary photography, and collaborative writing, her practice is grounded in questions of authorship, representation, and the interior lives of the people she photographs.

Zusman holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her background as a poet informs a photographic language recognized for its intimacy, warmth, and lyrical attention to gesture, memory, and the spaces between what is seen and what is said.

Zusman received the Leica Women’s Foto Project Award for Super Power of Me, her ongoing project pairing her portraits of young people with their own written self-portraits. Through poetry and creative writing, participants describe themselves from within, creating a counterpoint to Zusman’s photographic portrait. Rather than using text to explain the photograph, the project asks what happens when the photographer’s gaze becomes one voice among two, allowing young people to participate in determining how they are seen.

Separately, the Pulitzer Center supported Zusman’s photographic reporting on human trafficking in Southeast Asia. She has also been a guest speaker at UNESCO’s international training program in Bangkok for young human rights leaders from conflict regions around the world.

In 2026, House of Wisdom and the United Arab Emirates Board on Books for Young People invited Zusman to create a special edition of Super Power of Me in Sharjah, UAE, inspired by The Dice Player: Mahmoud Darwish, an exhibition honoring the legendary Palestinian poet and his literary legacy. Drawing on Darwish’s explorations of identity, memory, belonging, homeland, love, and becoming, Zusman worked with young people through writing and portrait workshops to create a new body of poems and photographs exploring both individual experience and shared human questions.

Zusman’s photography has been exhibited at Fotografiska New York, the Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of Photography, Leica Galleries in Los Angeles and Boston, Casilhaus, and Xposure International Photography Festival in the UAE. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, L’Oeil de la Photographie, and Boston Magazine, among others, and broadcast on PBS, NPR, ABC News, and NY1.

In 2022, Leica Camera selected one of Zusman’s photographs as the face of its The World Deserves Witnesses campaign, installing the image as a 150-by-100-foot wallscape in Los Angeles and on bus shelters throughout New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C. In 2023, she delivered the opening keynote at the Xposure International Photography Festival in the United Arab Emirates alongside photographers James Balog and Dan Winters.

Zusman’s engagement with young people also extends beyond her artistic practice. In 2014, she co-founded myME: Mobile Education Project with Burmese human rights advocate Tim Aye Hardy and others. Under Hardy’s direction, the organization brought teachers and classrooms directly to the workplaces of child laborers in Myanmar. Before the 2021 military coup, myME had provided non-formal education to more than 20,000 working and out-of-school young people.