Karen Jerzyk (American, b. 1981) is a fine art photographer who stages surreal, haunting scenes of solitary figures in abandoned buildings and other decaying spaces.,She cleans and restores each location before shooting, then uses dramatic lighting to create dreamlike, cinematic images that explore isolation, loss, and identity.,
Jerzyk is a self-taught photographer from the Greater Boston area, and took up the medium after her parents gave her a camera when she graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in English in 2003. She spent nearly a decade photographing for the music industry before shifting to portraiture in 2009 and then to fine art photography, developing her practice of staging scenes in abandoned buildings.,Her father died in 2011, and the loss pushed her work toward more introspective, personal themes of death and grief.
Her series The Lonely Astronaut began after she purchased a vintage high-altitude space suit in 2017, and she has since traveled internationally to photograph women wearing the suit alone in deserted, evocative settings such as an abandoned theater. The series is staged entirely with practical effects rather than digital compositing, and taps into Jerzyk's own affinity for exploration and her experience of social anxiety.Around the same period, a stop at an abandoned neighborhood in Pennsylvania led her to stage a second body of work: solitary figures in plain white sheet ghost costumes, photographed in abandoned and rural sites across the northeastern United States.She has also released work through NFT platforms including SuperRare, Foundation, and OBJKT, and appeared as a guest on The DAM Show, a digital art talk show hosted by Roger Dickerman, in 2026.
