Carol Steen is an artist, writer, curator and synesthete. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her work is in many public collections including the Library of Congress, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the McLaughlin Gallery in Canada. She has had over 20 solo exhibitions and been in numerous museum and gallery shows. Steen has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and the prestigious New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She has participated in many television and radio documentaries worldwide, including 60 Minutes, BBC, and NPR, and her work is included in over 40 books and articles including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the New York Times. She is frequently invited to speak about her work at universities and museums around the world and has presented at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City; the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY; and at the Royal Institution in London for the University of Sussex. In 2014, she was the Keynote Speaker for the South Carolina Federation of Museums.

She is the Co-Founder of the American Synesthesia Association, Inc., a 501(c)(3). Her chapter on "Synesthesia and the Artistic Process" was published in the Oxford Handbook of Synaesthesia, Oxford University Press, UK, 2013. In 2014, Peter Brook and Marie Helene Estienne created a character in their new play "The Valley of Astonishment", based in part on Steen's life.  Currently Steen continues work on her new series of 'works of light' created in Photoshop. Forty-six of these new works were recently exhibited at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Carol Steen has been on the faculty of Touro since 1983.