Karima Cammell is a painter, specializing in the use of natural pigments. She employs traditional painting materials and methods with a strong emphasis on craft. Her recent exhibition, High Water at the Holton Studio Gallery in Berkeley, California, featured works in watercolor on paper, egg tempera and oil on traditional gessoed wood panels, mirrored and gilded glass, as well as several large-scale digital line drawings. She credits her teachers, especially printmaker Stephen Thomas and egg tempera master Koo Schadler, with instilling a reverence for the wisdom of her creative forebearers and dedication to artistic rigor.

With a high regard for the stewardship of craft and culture, and an experienced respect for the power of creativity, Karima is an energetic, purposeful, and seasoned educator. She delights and takes pride in her work as a teacher of both large- and small-scale arts classes for adults and professionals, as well as youth arts programs in the Bay Area. Karima founded Castle in the Air, a shop, arts school, and online community, in 2001. Guided by a vision of the ideal artist’s studio, Castle in the Air continues to inspire artists and dreamers around the world and has led revivals in forgotten and endangered arts.

Karima is a celebrated author, illustrator, and essayist, and has written on a variety of subjects not limited to creative courage, perseverance, environmentalism, art, food, transformation, and trolls. In 1997 she founded an independent imprint, Dromedary Press. She has published eight illustrated books, as well as having her work featured in various publications. Karima’s books have won numerous awards and nominations, including the Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY), the International Rubery Book Award, and Indie Reader. She has twice been an honoree at the Authors Dinner for the Berkeley Public Library Foundation.

Karima’s personal motto is “Believe in the fantasy and make it real.” To that end she has attended the Carnevale di Venezia several times, manifesting fantasy in the form of characters of her own imagination. She spends months in advance crafting elaborate costumes from the ground up, delighting in the process as much as the result. The ability to turn nothing into something, using only the tools and skills that you already possess, is an addictively alchemic transformative power to practice and wield. 

Karima and her work have been featured in a number of publications, including Martha Stewart Living, Selvedge, Faerie Magazine, Where Women Create, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Vogue.com. She shared her personal style philosophy in Women in Clothes (Riverhead Books, 2014), and was a contributing artist for The Faerie Handbook (Harper Design, 2017) and The Mermaid Handbook (2018).