Karen Kriss is an artist, animator, researcher and Senior lecturer at UNSW Art and Design with over 10 years of experience in the animation and VFX industry. Her past roles have included Head of Production Management, VFX Producer, Digital Producer at Mr.X Toronto, Canada, as well as Senior Production Coordinator at Animal Logic, Sydney. Karen has worked on both short form animation and feature films including Oscar winning film Happy Feet.  During her 15 year tenure as an academic she has collaborated with artists from The Junction Works, a disability provider in south-western Sydney on several projects including two live interactive motion captured media arts projects Power of the Dream (2017), SPARK Festival Finale (2017) as well as animations Pirate of Floating Island animation (2018) and Destiny title sequence (2019). Karen worked with 5 artists on a Vivid Sydney 2019 project called Dream States which included large scale animation projections on the ICC building Sydney, Birdsmouth Screen ICC building and nineteen screens along Tumbalong boulevard. Karen also worked with these artists and Sapphire Coast artists (from Tulgeen Disability Arts) to co-curate the collage works that went into the creation of Dream States into an exhibition at Bega Valley Regional Gallery - Dream States Come True (2019). In 2022, Karen worked on another Vivid Sydney project called Crowded Cadmans with 9 artists from The Junction Works. Recently Karen was the Computer Animation Festival producer for SIGGRAPH ASIA 2023 and the Chair for the Society for Animation Society Annual Conference held for the first time in Sydney in July 2024.

In 2025 Karen was awarded the UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture Deans Award for Inclusion. She was also recently nominated as a finalist in the 2025 Student Voice Australasia (SVA) Student Voice Awards- for the category “Student-Staff Partnership Impact Award” along with her colleagues in the UNSW Diversified group (for which she is a founding member). She has also received the ADCET Excellence Award for Accessibility in Action (2023) and the UNSW ADA Dean’s Award for Audacious Vision. In 2023 she was also shortlisted for the UNSW 2023 Vice-Chancellor's Awards for her advocacy work in Disability and Mental Health. Her research bridges disability studies and animation, using techniques such as motion capture and 3D animation to create inclusive, collaborative art projects that represent diverse individuals. Karen also has an art practice that moves between these digital and more analogue physical realms.