Pantea Karimi has lived, studied, and worked in Iran, England and the United States.

She started her training at age fourteen in painting; playing classical guitar, xylophone and sol-fa for eight years also stimulated her creativity and led to her decision to pursue art professionally. She obtained her Masters of Graphic Design from Tehran Art University in Iran in 1999 and her BTEC Diploma in Printmaking from Hastings College of Arts and Technology in England in 2004. Currently, she is a graduate student of fine arts in the pictorial department at San Jose State University in San Jose California.

Pantea worked for several graphic companies in Iran and while residing in England assisted Alan Rankle, the renowned British landscape painter, in his Fine Art Studio. In 2006, she designed the entire fall issue of thresholds: ACCESS, a bi-annual journal of architecture, art and media published by MIT press. Pantea also has been teaching art and writing lesson plans for children for the past fourteen years and presently teaches at the Community School of Arts and Music in Mountain View, California. Her fine art and graphic works have been featured in several newspapers and magazines in Iran, Italy and England. Pantea's artworks have been selected for many juried art competitions in Iran, England and America as well as showcased in many group exhibitions. Traveling and living in different countries have enriched her sense of aesthetics and profoundly influenced her artwork.

My earlier works were inspired by modern poetry and the challenge of creating a pictorial counterpart to the lyrics in an attempt to build resonance between two seemingly orthogonal mediums and to strike equipoise. They also reflected a fascination with architectural spaces and the solitude of forgotten objects and human activities in relation to those spaces and objects, through the use of collage, printmaking techniques and embedded illustrations on glass.

The investigation of 19th century Iranian newspapers for my MFA thesis in Graphic Design became the basis for my current focus. Since fall 2006 at San Jose State University, I have been working on a series of prints and drawings inspired by Iranian popular publications before the 1979 revolution, using serigraphy and mixed media. The works involve various aspects of Iranian visual culture, especially the impact of western style commercials, constrained expression of femininity, as well as consideration of societal roles and occasions within a male-dominant culture in combination with the metaphors and icons of Iranian mythology.