Karla Cott was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico in 1980. She began painting at the age of ten. In high school she received recognition for her paintings and drawings and won a painting prize from the Municipality in her hometown. In 2003 she completed a Magna Cum Laude bachelor’s in painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico were she was the recipient of a painting prize in her third year of studies. While at school her focus shifted to the making of interdisciplinary installations that still involved painting. In 2004 she was one of the recipients of the Lexus grants for the Arts, leading to a show at the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art. She was then invited in 2005 to show at the V Certamen Nacional de Artes at the Arsenal de la Puntilla in San Juan Puerto Rico. In 2007 she had her first solo show, Reveries, at the Guatibirí Gallery in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2008 she was invited to participate in the show On Your Marks at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Karla has also taken part in numerous group shows since 2001, both in Puerto Rico and the United States. In 2009, she completed a MFA degree in Interdisciplinary Art from the Mt. Royal School of Art in the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work is part of the Permanent Collection of the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art.

Her current body of work consists of installations containing hand drawn animations, music and large-scale drawings. The images, situations and sounds presented in her work are meant to trigger an emotional, psychological response in the viewer. Yet, they hold no specific narrative or biography. They are meant to create tension, and mostly allude to fragility and childhood, to innocent cruelty, or to an irreconcilable cultural past. Her work is strongly influenced by psychological, existential cinema, such as the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Chris Marker, the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer. She is also strongly influenced by writers who constantly allude to memory, experience and the self, such as Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Friedrick Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke.