About Karen

Internationally celebrated singer-actress, writer and orator, KAREN KOHLER lives for the unconventional in art and love. She emigrated to the U.S. from Germany as a child, learned English in a gospel choir, married her college sweetheart and was being paid handsomely in stock options when the call to performance seized her. For decades she has fueled a critically acclaimed performance career from her base in New York City. As singer, Karen is passionate about story songs, crossbreeding a decadent range of theatrical and musical styles from jazz and Delta blues to classical, rock-folk and cabaret. Winner of the NY Nightlife, Mac, BroadwayWorld and Backstage Bistro awards, she is also a sought-after director and founding producer of the award-winning Kabarett Kollektif and cabaret festival, Kabarett Fête. She has endowed the world’s only collegiate scholarship for the cabaret arts on Long Island, lectures at the university level on the European roots of small stage performance, and guides a diversity of artists in fulfilling their creative calling. Lately, Karen has been turning her love of words into the writing craft and, as a lifelong journaler and good story enthusiast, releasing her own prose and poetry, homilies and monologues into the world.