Karin Gulbran was born in Seattle, WA, in 1967. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Karin Gulbran is a prominent figure in California's avant-garde craft movement, known for her contribution to the field of ceramic sculpture. Over the course of 20 years, Gulbran has pioneered a new generation of artists characterised by their deliberately simple and classical forms decorated with pictorial narratives. Her work utilises gestural figuration, blending in recurring abstracted motifs inspired by nature, resulting in a distinctive visual language. Gulbran's artistic repertoire includes various elements, such as leaf and branch shapes, animals, and raindrops, showcasing her remarkable ability to create and convey her own symbolic language. The animal motif holds a profound significance in Gulbran's work. Her clay sculptures and painted vessels exude empathy as if the creatures themselves were nurtured into existence, forming an extended family that the artist revisits periodically. Gulbran's current body of work encompasses several ongoing series, including the Animal Pots and Fishbowls, the Sculptural Bird Vases, and her most recent venture, the Obscure Mirrors series, which seamlessly combines glass with ceramics. In this latter series, a monochrome coloured glass is encased within a glazed ceramic landscape adorned with small creatures, rocks, and flowers. These wall-hanging works come to life as daylight filters through the glass, creating subtle shifts in colour.

Gulbran’s work is in the permanent collection of the TIA Collection, Santa Fe and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.