Without forethought, Kari Byron has trained to be a MythBuster since she was a kid. By the age of 5 she was setting up experiments to test on her sister and using dolls as crash test dummies. Luckily for her parents, they always caught her right before little sister took a ride down a laundry chute or was the subject of an "around-the-world" attempt on the playground swings.
After graduating from San Francisco State and traveling the world, Kari began her career as an artist, working in sculpture and painting and holding successful exhibitions at some of San Francisco's leading galleries. "Artist" was only one of many hats she wore while searching for her place in the world. Her sculpting skills and love for odd jobs soon led her into the field of model-making and toy-prototyping, which led to a job with Jamie Hyneman at M5 Industries. It was at M5 that Kari got her first big break with the MythBusters team.
During the "vacuum toilet" segment of one of the first episodes (which examined whether a person could get sucked into an airplane toilet), Jamie needed a 3-D scan of a person's backside, and Kari had the right ... well, you know. Basically, she was in the right place at the right time. The rest is history, although we'd be remiss if we overlooked Kari's former job experience as a secret martini shopper, rose delivery driver and store mannequin to foil shoplifters — just to name a few. Who knew that a degree in film and sculpture would actually be applicable to a real-life career one day?
Now Kari works with the MythBusters team, using science and Yankee ingenuity to solve the mysteries of today's most compelling urban legends.
