Born and raised in San Francisco, Ana Karkar studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Sorbonne and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She dropped out of her MFA for a job at Louis Vuitton HQ where she worked for 7 years in image production and digital media. In 2013 she was mentored in the TURPS Correspondence program based in London.

Her work is influenced by images held in the collective conscious, experimental film and cinema. She offers an alternative perspective to these images via painting. The storytelling in her work is inspired by film directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma and Dario Argento as well as a number of contemporary photographers. Her painterly stroke evokes that of Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele as well as the Viennese Secession reprised in Psychedelic Art from her hometown.

More recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Consulat de la Gaité in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, and DZIALDOV in Berlin. Her work has been presented by international galleries, mostly in Germany and Luxembourg, but also in France, Belgium, the UK and Japan.