Karen M. Kensek is on the faculty of the USC School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.

[3] She taught for several years at Berkeley prior to joining the faculty at the University of Southern California in 1991.

In 1991, she founded the CLIPPER Lab with Douglas Noble at USC to support research and education in architectural computing.

[5] She has collaborated with noted architects and educators, including Pierre Koenig, Douglas E. Noble, Marc Eugene Schiler, and Ralph Lewis Knowles.

With Noble and Mic Patterson, she co-founded the Facade Tectonics Institute in 2007 as a university-based research and education organization.