Born inLatina, Italy.
Since she was a child, she studied piano and singing. Soon she got passionate about photography and visual and plastic arts.

She graduated at the L. Refice Conservatory of Frosinone and, after obtaining the Master of Arts diploma, she specialized in Applied Art at the J. Romani State Institute of Velletri. She enrolled in the Music and Entertainment Department of the Sapienza University of Rome, studying in the meantime acting at the SAT (Theater Training School) and attending a Psychodrama workshop with Professor Ferruccio di Cori.

In 1994 she made her debut as an actress at the Ancient Greek Theater of Taormina in the tragedy of Arthur Miller A look from the bridge, directed by Teodoro Cassano, in the role of Catherine, alongside Michele Placido. In theater she also worked, among others, with Anna Mazzamauro, Pino Quartullo, Anna Galiena and she played Tuzza in Liolà by Luigi Pirandello directed by Gigi Proietti.

In 1996 she made her debut in cinema with Cinque giorni di tempesta by Francesco Calogero, followed by, among others, Terra Bruciata and Ragazze a mano armata by Fabio Segatori and Segreti di famiglia by Dennis Berry, working alongside actors like Joe Mantegna, Emmanuelle Seigner, Henry Cavill, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Giancarlo Giannini, Sergio Starringellitto, Burt Young.

She worked as a protagonist in films and TV series, like La vita che verrà by Pasquale Pozzessere, Vola Sciusciù by Joseph Sargent, Crusaders by Dominique Othenin-Girard, Vite a perdere by Paolo Bianchini, Area Paradiso by Diego Abatantuono and Armando Trivellini, in all four series of Le tre rose di Eva, in the cult series Boris by Ciarrapico, Torre and Vendruscolo, and more.

In 2008 she made her debut as a director, a short film she wrote, entitled Farfallina, screened and awarded at several festivals.

In 2014 she founded with Raffaele Buranelli C’è S.r.l., a Movie Production and Distribution company, that has produced the movie Una gita a Roma, directed by her, one documentary and six short films and that, at the moment, is developing two films, one documentay and two webseries.

Una gita a Roma, written and directed by Karin Proia, with the special appearance by Claudia Cardinale and Philippe Leroy and the music by the Oscar-winning Nicola Piovani, has been released in Italy on May 4, 2017 and screened for the first time at Toronto's Female Eye Film Festival 2016, where it received three nominations: Best Show, Best Debut Film and Best Foreign Film, being awarded as Best Foreign Film. The film also won the Audience Award at RIFF 2017 in Moscow and the Cinecibo Award at Terra di Siena International Film Festival 2017, where the small protagonist Tea Buranelli also won the Special Jury Prize for the Best Newcomer Actress. Selected for the italian Young Cinema Award 2018, selected in the five titles representing the italian quality cinema at Les Journées du Cinema Italien 2018 in Tunis, selected among the fourteen titles of the Retrospective dedicated to Claudia Cardinale for the inauguration of the newborn Cinématèque Tunisienne in March 2018, the film won as Best Production at Spoleto Film Festival 2018. It has been distribuited also in Russia and in the CIS countries.