[1] Olivier was born in 1968 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where she and her twin sister lived with their family before they moved to Brooklyn, New York, in early childhood.

[4] In Olivier's work, familiar objects, spaces and locations are altered in function and medium to create uncanny meditations on stagnancy, division and the weight of materiality.

[5] Her sculptures, installations and public art explore the politics and poetics of space, and the role of viewers in shaping their own experience and engagement.

[11][12] Hyperallergic's  Samantha Mitchell commented "Karyn Olivier's "The Battle is Joined" approaches the question of what might be done with existing monuments to update their contemporary resonance.

[20] Olivier created a lenticular billboard that blended contrasting topographic and anthropologic histories through three images—a glacier, a pottery shard from the historic Seneca Village settlement, and an image of the contemporary landscape.

Here and Now reframed Olmsted's picturesque landscape from Olivier's viewpoint as an African American woman attentive to human difference and non-human agency.