Karen Painter is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Minnesota. She earned her B.A. in music and philosophy at Yale University and her PhD in music from Columbia University, and her research focuses on the relationship between music, listening and ideology in the context of 19th century German social history, World War I, Austro-German socialism and Nazism. She has previously served as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts, and has held faculty appointments at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Professor Painter has held many fellowships, among them a Mellon Foundation summer research fellowship (1992), the Berlin Prize from the American Academy of Berlin (2000) and the 2014-15 visiting scholarship at the Harvard University Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. She is the author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 (2008) and Mahler and His World (2002), as well as the co-editor of three volumes. 

During her time at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Professor Painter consulted with Center and Institute staff to incorporate VHA testimonies into the curriculum of her freshman seminar “Music in Nazi Germany.” The course, which she has taught nine times, examines the role of music in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust and as a form of commemoration in other genocides.