Karen Bachmann

Karen Bachmann specializes in jewelry, hollowware, and decorative art. She has special interests in medieval, memento mori , Renaissance, Baroque, and 19th century hairwork. She has been collecting Victorian hairwork jewelry and wall pieces for many years and is often called upon to loan her pieces to museums and lecture on the subject. Her studio work revolves around modern iterations of the genre of hairwork, incorporated into jewelry, wearable art, and decorative objects. She is a practicing studio jeweler with over 25 years of experience creating fine jewelry and is a former master jeweler at Tiffany & Co. She has exhibited her work extensively which can be found in international private and public collections. At Pratt, she teaches in both the Art History and Fine Art departments. She also serves as adjunct professor in jewelry design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Karen is a former artist and scholar in residence at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her work has been published in Art Jewelry today and the Lark 500 series of books. Published works include “Hairy Secrets: Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Hairwork Jewelry” and “Queen of the Stone Age: the Venus of Willendorf”. Her most recent publication is an essay on hairwork in Death: A Graveside Companion, by Thames & Hudson

B.F.A. Sculpture/Jewelry, Pratt Institute; M.A. History of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York.