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 Born in Minneapolis, raised in Livermore, California, and currently living in Fresno, California, Karen has been active as a performer throughout her life. Her professional background includes choreographing, directing, and performing in regional theatres and touring shows, singing in rock, blues, and jazz bands, doing voice-overs and studio work, and teaching dance and theatre with children and adults. She enjoys performing a wide variety of styles of music, being drawn primarily by lyrics, she says. "Any song that has unexpected, interesting, or simply profound lyrics draws my attention. It is the storytelling part of singing that I love best."
Karen has also worked as an educator since 1986, working as a classroom teacher in public elementary and middle schools, as an instructor for pre-service teachers at CSU Hayward, as a private consultant in school districts throughout California and for the UC Berkeley Writing Project. Her classroom methods have been the subject of two national research studies, and she received San Joaquin County's CTA Outstanding Educator Award in 1990. Currently, she is serving Fresno Unified Schools as an Instructional Coach, and writing a book about effective methods for building student self-efficacy in the classroom.
"Music, theatre and education merge quite logically for me," Karen says. "Teaching and singing are both performance arts, the goal being to convey to the audience what’s important in the lesson or the song."
In 1999, when she moved to Fresno, Karen began to seek out opportunities to meet and work with local musicians. Happily, with stations like KFSR and organizations like Jazz Fresno, she found it easy to find out about local musical events. By 2001, the Blue Street Jazz Band had started using her as a substitute vocalist, and that’s when her work in jazz performance began. Blue Street performs around the country at Jazz Festivals, and Karen soaked in all she could by listening to and talking with musicians and audience members at the festivals. People would recommend vocalists for her to study, and study she did. Though she still considers herself to be "low on the learning curve" about jazz, she has embraced jazz's call to free oneself from the goal of creating "perfect" performances. Rather, jazz demands that an artist who is grounded in the structures of music theory let go and play with the music to create something new.
In 2008, Karen suggested to KFSR's station manager, Joe Moore, that it might be fun to create a show focused on female vocalists. He agreed, and KFSR's Vocal Hour was born.
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