Biography

Sharon Karp is a consummate filmmaker and editor. For more than thirty years she has also used her editorial skills to bring voice to other filmmakers concerned with issues of social/ environmental justice and healing. Sharon Karp is a founding member of the Chicago-based film collective, Kartemquin Films. Since 1974 she has been involved in the production of documentary films and in 1995 formed a full-service video production and post-production house called Media Monster. These works have been for both educational and commercial clients.

Sharon Karp is born of extraordinary parents who survived and witnessed the horrors of the European theater of WW II, Her father was a doctor and dedicated photographer. Her mother was a sage, She was raised a creative and literary daughter. Sharon taught English early in her adult life. She is an accomplished musician (piano). Her sense of rhythm and flow translates to her editorial style, and keen sound sense. Though an independent film maker and editor by her own definition. Sharon's sound recording and extraction capacities are equally keen. Ms. Karp learned her film craft at Columbia College, Chicago. She was raised in and still works from Chicago.

Among her award-winning films are the 1986 Emma-Nominated Silent Pioneers and the Chicago Film Festival Silver Hugo Winner. The Chicago Maternity Center Story. Ms. Karp was an editor on the Kartemquin-produced Vietnam: Long Time Coming, a film following American and Vietnamese veterans on a 1200 mile bicycle ride from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam: Long Time Coming was shown on NBC, chosen Best Documentary of 1998 by The Directors Guild of America, and won an Emmy the same year. Ms. Karp traveled to Morocco in 2001 to shoot Voices of the Geniza: Portraits from Medieval Cairo for an exhibit at the Spertus Museum. The film won a prestigious Muse award. Additional projects include The Innocent, a film about men and women wrongly sentenced to death, which opened in April 2005, winning the Jury award at the Indiana Film Festival and the Crystal Heart Award for documentary feature films; Burnt Oranges, a film about state terrorism in Argentina during the 1970s, which screened at Chicago's Gene Siskel Center in Spring 2005, and in 2006, won the Cine Golden Eagle award. She has edited works of writer -director- medical ethicist September Williams including Shared Decisions, A Conversation On Moral Intuition, When We are Asked and Dance for Joy.

Ms. Karp's body of work includes Picture Man: The Poetry of Photographer Milton Rogovin, the social documentarian who for nearly forty years photographed people around the world at work; Never Turning Back, a documentary about the 90-year old artist and political activist Peggy Lipschutz and her famous chalk-talks; Forever Whole, a DVD presenting therapeutic and practical options to women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer; Standing Silent Nation, an independent documentary chronicling the struggle of a Lakota Indian family to develop a hemp industry on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, winner of the 2008 Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary at the Sedona International Film Festival and the 2007 International Documentary Association (IDA) nomination for Pare Lorentz Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards. Sharon Karp is among the most accomplished persons in film.
- IMDb mini biography by: September Williams