Karin Rosenthal’s photographs of the nude in nature reside in numerous private collections and in 16 museum collections, including the Boston MFA, Boston Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Santa Barbara MFA, the Fogg, Rose, and Danforth Art Museums, the International Center of Photography, and the Yale University Art Gallery. 



In 1978, Rosenthal received an alumna traveling fellowship from Wellesley College to photograph in Greece. Since then, her nudes have been exhibited internationally with showings at the Benham Gallery (Seattle), Verve and Photo-Eye Galleries (Santa Fe) and Weston Gallery (Carmel). MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics sponsored a yearlong exhibition. Rosenthal’s photograph in First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography at the Yale University Art Gallery was selected to represent the show of 100 images by famous 20th Century photographers and was featured in the New York Times review. 



Rosenthal received a LEF Foundation Grant, the 2006 Ultimate Eye Foundation Grant for Figurative Photography, Grand Prize in the 2010 Renaissance International Photography Competition and First Prize in Nudes in the 2010 Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. In 2014-2016, her photographs were exhibited and sold at AIPAD in NYC, a highly prestigious exposition of photography presented by the world’s top galleries.

Rosenthal has served on the Steering Committee of New England Women in Photography (NEWIP) since 1995. As a Resident Scholar at Brandeis’ Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC), she initiated and co-curated the 2013 WSRC exhibition Vivian Maier: A Woman’s Lens, for which she lectured and organized a panel with NEWIP. The exhibition was selected by Jared Bowen of Greater Boston as one of the top Boston arts events of 2013. In 2016, Rosenthal curated 37 Photographers / One Model for the Griffin Museum of Photography, a show of male nudes by her and her workshop students that upends conventions of nude photography. It was accompanied by The Human Landscape: Photographs by Karin Rosenthal containing work from 3 of her photographic series.