Karolina Karlic is a Minneapolis-based photographer. Born in Wroclaw Poland, her family immigrated to Detroit in search of the American dream in 1986. Karlic's work explores American culture from the complicated perspective of an immigrant and a "white" girl growing up in urban Detroit. Growing up the daughter of highly educated parents who fled communist Poland to find work in the American auto industry, Karlic watched as her father's hopes for his family crumbled alongside the stock of Ford, General Motors, and Daimler Chrysler's North American operations.

Her series "The Dee" (slang for Detroit) explores themes of desire and regret. Vacant automobile factories and single-family-homes stalled in construction stand silently in Karlic's photographs, metaphors for economic crisis and its effect of a community. Also included in the series are portraits of people the artist has met on the streets and images of young families gathered on the porches of rental property, which speak of beauty, creativity, and the desire to succeed.

Karlic's current work continues to examine the theme of desire and its flip-side, despair. Through photography and video she is exploring ways in which the Internet is used as an anonymous space to romantically connect as well as to reveal ones deepest desire or shame.