[9] She was performing at the Cairo Opera in 2000 as the prima ballerina when she was given an opportunity to appear on Fawazeer Ramadan, a popular Egyptian radio and television show that included dance routines.

In 2002 Karim landed her first film role in Youth on Air (Shabab Ala El Hawa) starring alongside Hanan Turk, another Egyptian ballerina turned actress.

In 2004 Karim played the role of a ballerina in Khaled Youssef's You're My Life (Enta Omry), and won the Best Actress award at the Cairo International Film Festival.

That same year, she starred alongside singer-actor Moustafa Amar inYour Love's Fire (Hobak Nar), a musical drama inspired by Romeo & Juliet.

With Cairo as the backdrop on the eve of an important soccer match, the story follows the lives of eight characters over the course of a single day, including Karim's Riham, a young religious nurse.

[18] She teamed up again with Zekry and Naoum in 2014's Women’s Prison (Segn el Nesaa), another hit series, and an adaption of a play by Fathia al-Assal.

In a 2019 interview, Karim noted that filming the series was emotionally challenging, and that killing one of the characters (el Nesaa) was the most difficult scene of her career to that date.

In 2015 Karim appeared in Under Control (Taht el Saytra) a Ramadan series that received wide attention for addressing the issue of drug addiction, a topic rarely shown on Egyptian screens.

Directed by Tamer Mohsen and scripted by Mariam Naoum, the series centered around Karim's character, a struggling drug addict who relapses after nine years of recovery.

Told entirely within the confines of a police truck filled with a mix of detained protestors, the tensions among them reflected the real-life conflicts between Muslim Brotherhood and pro-army supporters.