Karen Barry is a socially engaged artist living and working in Weston-super-Mare in the South West of England. In September 2024, she graduated from the MA in Art and Social Practice at the University of the Highlands and Islands where she explored her relationship with the sea, nature based approaches to socially engaged art and how to support practices of care with other socially engaged practitioners. 

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Karen regularly runs a range of different workshops and creative activities for families and other community groups locally, and has worked with Super Culture, North Somerset Community Learning, Grow Feral, Weston College, Weston Artspace and Refugees Welcome North Somerset. As well as her artistic practice, Karen is a community organiser. She works in a freelance capacity with local community groups and organisations to help bring people together, empowering them to improve the places they live and work, develop their networks, learn new skills and find more joy and connection in their local community. She is currently one of the directors of Grow Feral CIC, and on the board of Frome based arts organisation Terrestrial. Previously, she was a director of Weston Artspace CIC and a founding member of their High Street based community studio between 2019 and 2024, before moving on to focus on her own practice following on from her MA studies.

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As well as her work and love of sea swimming, Karen is bringing up her young family in Weston and hopes her two daughters will fall in love with her home town as much as she has over the time she has lived there.