Karen T. Taylor

The FBI in Washington, D.C. commissioned Taylor to do an age progression sculpture of fugitive suspected family annihilator William Bradford Bishop. Bishop was added to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List on April 10, 2014.

Premiering in 2012, Taylor acted as part of the "Texas Team" for the television series The Decrypters, produced by Shine Television of London. In the US, the show aired on the National Geographic Channel. For each episode, the team, primarily composed of anthropologists from the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University (FACTS), examined historically interesting skeletal cases using modern investigative methods. Taylor's task was to assess the various skulls and artistically determine how the individual would have appeared in life.

In early 2012, members of the Dubuque County Historical Society and curators at the National Mississippi River Museum asked Taylor to create a 2D facial reconstruction based on the skull of Julien Dubuque, founder of Dubuque, Iowa. Taylor was able to produce a reconstruction using photos of Dubuque's skull taken in 1887.

Taylor was a forensic art instructor for over twenty years at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia (through the fall of 2006) and other law enforcement academies, universities, art and medical schools internationally. She also conducts face-related training workshops for fine artists and specializes in highly accurate and subtly expressive portraits in bronze.

Taylor was featured in American Artist Drawing magazine, Summer 2006 in an article titled, "Understanding Faces from the Inside Out" by Edith Zimmerman.

In 2002, she was the first woman to receive the "Dondero Award" from the International Association for Identification for her "outstanding contribution in the field of scientific identification". Previous Dondero Award recipients include J. Edgar Hoover and Dr. Henry Lee.

Taylor authored the in-depth textbook, Forensic Art and Illustration, CRC Press, Boca Raton, London, New York, Washington DC, 2001.

After years of success as a forensic artist, helping capture criminals and identify their victims, Taylor was named one of the "Texas Women of the Century" in 1999, a tribute to the 100 most influential Texas women of the past century. The twenty four collaborating organizations of the Women of the Century Project described her as "the premier forensic artist in the world". Taylor shared the honor with fellow recipients, Barbara Bush, Dale Evans, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Jordon, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Governor Ann Richards, Mary Kay Ash, Elisabet Ney and others.

In October, 1997 Texas Department of Public Safety, Colonel Dudley M. Thomas honored Taylor with a "Director's Citation" for service beyond the normal course of duty, "performing the difficult task of identifying victims and assisting in bringing dangerous criminals to justice". Director Thomas recognized her "professionalism, ambition, and talent which advanced her status as a forensic artist to a position that leads the nation in providing a variety of forensic art techniques and services". The award made particular note of Taylor's ingenuity and initiative which led to the development of the 2-dimensional facial reconstruction technique that "has been recognized internationally, revolutionizing skull-to-face reconstruction and making an invaluable contribution to the Department, law enforcement and anthropological research."

Beginning in 1990, Taylor was a contributor to America's Most Wanted on FOX, and remained so until the show's cancellation. One unidentified deceased case, done for the Chicago Police Department and AMW, could be seen on the show's website. Taylor's reconstruction of the young murdered girl led to her identification.

Karen T. Taylor, also known as Karen Taylor Stewart (born March 6, 1952) is an American forensic and portrait artist who has worked to help resolve criminal cases for a variety of law enforcement agencies throughout the world. Her primary expertise includes composite imagery, child and adult age progression, postmortem drawing and forensic facial reconstruction. In the mid-1980s, Taylor pioneered the method of 2-dimensional facial reconstruction, by drawing facial features over frontal and lateral skull photographs based on anthropological data. Taylor is also well-established as a forensic art educator, fine art portrait sculptor, and specialist in the human face.