Karen Bermann

Karen Bermann grew up in Brooklyn and Queens in the 1960s and 70s. At age nineteen she was working on sweat equity rehabilitation on the Lower East Side. She was a housing activist, paid the rent as a typesetter, and then went to architecture school at The Coper Union, graduating in 1983.

She has taught design and drawing for many years as a professor of architecture in Iowa and in Rome. She has published and presented widely in academic contexts on questions of identity, memory, and place. She lives in Rome.