Karina Arroyave is a Colombian American actress and playwright whose career on stage, film, and television now spans nearly four decades. Born in Colombia and raised in New York City from the age of one, she trained in acting at LaGuardia High School and later studied comedic technique at The Groundlings in Los Angeles.
She made her television debut on The Equalizer in 1988 and joined CBS's As the World Turns as Bianca Marquez Walsh the following year, staying with the show as a series regular through 1994. On screen she is known as Jamey Farrell in the first season of Fox's 24, Karla Córdova, the Salvadoran detainee, in the final season of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black, and Mierce Xiu, James Spader's love interest, across the ninth season of NBC's The Blacklist. Her film credits include Lean on Me opposite Morgan Freeman, Falling Down, Dangerous Minds, One Eight Seven, Flawless, In Too Deep, The Cowboy Way, Trial by Jury, Empire, Adam, Adrift in Manhattan, Lost Cat Corona, and Crash, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. She also co-starred opposite Joanne Woodward in the Hallmark Hall of Fame film Blind Spot.
Her recent work includes FX's limited series A Murder at the End of the World, the thriller You Can't Stay Here opposite Guillermo DÃaz, The Reunion, and an episode of FBI: Most Wanted. She appears as Rosie in the upcoming feature The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Her many other television credits include Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, NYPD Blue, Blue Bloods, Bull, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, The Practice, The Mysteries of Laura, Judging Amy, Chicago Hope, Without a Trace, Touched by an Angel, New York Undercover, and Brooklyn South.
In the theater, Karina made her stage debut in the title role of José Rivera's Marisol at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and her Broadway debut in Jane Bowles' In the Summer House at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. She has also appeared in Rivera's School of the Americas, Stephen Adly Guirgis' Between Riverside and Crazy and The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes' Water by the Spoonful, Eduardo Machado's Once Removed, Tony Glazer's Stain, and Adam Bock's Swimming in the Shallows. She is also a playwright.
Karina serves as a Founding Instructor at The New York Performing Arts Academy and is faculty of the Drama Department at The Conservatory at NYPAA.
In the acting studio at The Conservatory, Karina teaches from the position of someone who has had to deliver under real conditions for almost forty years, in a network drama, a Pulitzer winning play, and an Oscar winning film. Her work with students centers on emotional truth and the discipline required to reach it on command, take after take, without manufacturing it. She pushes actors into the parts of a character they would rather avoid, and she is equally direct about the professional realities waiting outside the room: what a callback actually wants, how to hold your own on a set where you are the newest person there, and how to build a career rather than wait for one. Her conviction is that every actor has a specific story only they can tell, and her job is to give them the technique to tell it.
