Kara Elizabeth Walker (born November 26, 1969) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, and university professor, who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. Walker is most well known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes that interrogate romantic narratives of the antebellum South of the United States. She is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.

Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.

Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California. Her father, Larry Walker, was a painter and professor. Her mother Gwendolyn was an administrative assistant. A 2007 review in New York Times described her early life as calm, noting that "nothing about [Walker's] very early life would seem to have predestined her for this task. Born in 1969, she grew up in an integrated California suburb, part of a generation for whom the uplift and fervor of the civil rights movement and the want-it-now anger of Black Power were yesterday's news."

When Walker was 13, her father accepted a position at Georgia State University. They settled in the city of Stone Mountain. The move was a culture shock for the young artist. In sharp contrast with the multicultural environment of Central California, Stone Mountain still held Ku Klux Klan rallies. At her new high school, Walker recalls, "I was called a 'nigger,' told I looked like a monkey, accused (I didn't know it was an accusation) of being a 'Yankee.'"

Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1994. Walker recalls reflecting on her father's influence: "One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad's lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: 'I want to do that, too,' and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad." She found herself uncomfortable and afraid, however, to address the issues of race within her art during her early college years, worrying it would be received as "typical" or "obvious"; however, she began introducing them into her art while attending RISD for her master's.

Walker first became known for her oversize tableaux of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. She has also produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, magic lantern projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious 2014 public exhibition with Creative Time called A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The black-and-white silhouettes confront the realities of Western history while also using the stereotypes from the era of American slavery to relate to persistent modern-day concerns. Drawings also constitute a significant portion of Walker's body of work. The artist reserves a special meaning to this medium in her artistic practice as a space to confront the Western canon and find freedom from its historical criteria dominating painting: “I gravitated towards [drawing] pretty early on in graduate school […] partly as a way to escape the chains of western painting. […] Drawing transforms a blank page into a site of reflection.” A major retrospective dedicated to Walker’s drawings and archival materials was held at Kunstmuseum Basel in 2021.

She first came to the art world's attention in 1994 with her mural Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. This cut-paper silhouette mural, presenting an Antebellum South filled with sex and slavery, was an instant hit. The artwork's title references Margaret Mitchell's popular novel Gone with the Wind, and the individual figures in the tableau index the fairy-tale universe of Walt Disney in the 1930s. At the age of 28, Walker became the second youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, second only to Mayanist David Stuart. In 2007, the Walker Art Center exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love was the artist's first full-scale U.S. museum survey.

Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African-American women in particular. Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how enslaved African Americans were depicted during that time. The silhouette was typically a genteel tradition in American art history; it was often used for family portraits and book illustrations. Walker carried on this portrait tradition but used them to create characters in a nightmarish world, a world that reveals the brutality of American racism and inequality. Walker incorporates ominous, sharp fragments of the South's landscape, such as Spanish moss trees and a giant moon obscured by dramatic clouds. These images surround the viewer and create a circular, claustrophobic space. The circular format paid homage to another art form, the 360-degree historical painting known as the cyclorama.