Karin Hanssen studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp and she has shown extensively in Europe and internationally. In October 2012 she will show her work at Canberra Contemporary Art Space where she is invited as artist in residence. From 2008 onwards she has been working as a researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and in 2011 she started her PhD project 'The Borrowed Gaze' on the use of displacement in time and space of the photographical image of the past in contemporary figurative painting.