Karen Jacobson has called Philadelphia home since 1973 and started her career as a teacher of the deaf at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. After three years, her career morphed into motherhood. Simultaneously she joined the Pennsylvania Hospital’s Hospice Program Board, supporting the Program’s mission to secure peace and safety for life’s end stage.. Eventually Karen changed careers to psychotherapy. It was during those professional years that Karen found inspiration in photography and pursued the hobby. With the call of photography strong, Karen joined the Philadelphia Photo Art Center’s Philly Photo Day Event. Once she became hooked by photography’s power, Karen sought more opportunities to engage with the community thus joining the Board of Trustees Karen wass a critical figure in TILT’s growth by helping the organization raise funds needed to meet the mission of elevating and educating the growth of photography in the Philadelphia region.
John E. Dowell, Jr. is an artist and master-printer with a career spanning more than four decades. John’s fine art prints, paintings and photographs have been featured in more than 50 one-person exhibitions and represented in the permanent collections of 70 museum and public collections. John is a Philadelphia native and Professor Emeritus of Printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. John was trained as a master printer at the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop in the 1960’s. In the 1980’s John used his works on paper as scores for music concerts. Most recently, John has been working on a large body of photographs illuminating histories of the Black American experience.