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

Karima is an energetic, purposeful educator with a high regard for the stewardship of craft and culture. In 2026, she graduated with honors from the Executive Master’s in Cultural Leadership program at the Royal Academy of Arts and Maastricht University. She also earned a certificate from the V&A Academy in London. She teaches arts classes for adults and professionals, as well as youth arts programs in the Bay Area. In 2001, she founded Castle in the Air, a shop, arts school, and online community guided by her vision of an ideal artist’s studio. Its work has inspired artists and dreamers around the world and helped revive forgotten and endangered arts.

Karima is an author, illustrator, and essayist whose subjects include creative courage, perseverance, environmentalism, art, food, transformation, and trolls. In 1997, she founded the independent imprint Dromedary Press. She has published eight illustrated books, and her work has appeared in various publications. Her books have received awards and nominations from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), the International Rubery Book Awards, and IndieReader. She has twice been an honoree at the Berkeley Public Library Foundation’s Authors Dinner.

Karima’s personal motto is “Believe in the fantasy and make it real.” She has attended the Carnevale di Venezia several times as characters of her own imagination. She spends months crafting elaborate costumes from the ground up, taking as much delight in the process as in the result. For Karima, turning an idea into something tangible with the tools and skills already at hand is a transformative power worth practicing.

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).