Karin Apollonia Müller

Karin Apollonia Müller (b. 1963, Heidelberg) is a German photographer and visual artist who lives and works in California and Germany. She studied film and photography at the renowned Folkwang School in Essen, where she received her MFA in 1992. Müller's work explores the relationship between humans and their environment, focusing on the shifting boundaries between urban and natural landscapes. Her photographs probe enduring questions of identity, place, and belonging, often evoking a sense of solitude and the fragile balance between civilization and nature.

Müller has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a DAAD Fellowship, a Villa Aurora Residency, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and an artist commission from the Getty/CalArts Grant. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She has published several monographs, including Angels in Fall (Kruse Verlag, Hamburg), On Edge (Nazraeli Press, California), Timbercove (Nazraeli Press), and Gate.

In addition to her artistic practice, Müller has taught photography at institutions including UCLA, UC Irvine, and the Free University of Bozen, and has led workshops and seminars internationally. Her recent work incorporates found imagery from both macro- and microscopic sources, further examining the interplay between humanity and the physical world.