Susan Meiselas, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948, received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs, who she photographed during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in New York public schools. Carnival Strippers was originally published in 1976 and a selection was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000.

Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has worked as a freelance photographer since then. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her extensive documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. She published her second monograph, Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979, in 1981.

Meiselas served as an editor and contributor to the book El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers (1983) and edited Chile from Within (1991) featuring work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime, as well as an updated e-book on the 40th anniversary of the Chilean coup (2013). She has co- directed three films, Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986); Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti where she searches for the people in her photographs ten years after they were taken and Re-framing History (2004) where she returns to Nicaragua again, on the 25th anniversary of the Revolution, with 19 murals to place them in the landscape where they were first made to again interrogate the history they represent.

In 1997, she completed a six-year project curating a hundred-year photographic history of Kurdistan, integrating her own work into the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997) along with the pioneering website akaKURDISTAN (1998), an online archive of collective memory and cultural exchange.

Her 2001 monograph Pandora’s Box (2001) which explores a New York S & M club, has been exhibited both at home and abroad. The 2003 book and exhibition Encounters with the Dani documents a sixty-year history of outsiders’ discovery and interactions with the Dani, an indigenous people of the highlands of Papua in Indonesia. Her first retrospective exhibition and book In History (2008) was produced with the International Center for Photography and published by Steidl. A further survey of Meiselas’ four decades of work, Mediations, launched in 2017 and traveled to the Fundacion Tapies in Barcelona, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Instituto Moreira Salles in Sao Paulo.

A more recent project A Room Of Their Own (2015-2016) explores the experiences of women taking refuge in the Black Country UK. Commissioned by UK based arts organization Multistory, Meiselas led a series of workshops with women in refuge to create a visual narrative combining photographs, first hand testimonies and original artwork. A Room Of Their Own was published by Multistory in 2017.

The latest book, Tar Beach (2020), gathers family photographs and memories from Little Italy, New York, with two of her neighbors, focusing on life on the rooftops, celebrating everyday lives from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Meiselas has had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and her work is included in collections around the world. She has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for her work in Nicaragua (1979); the Leica Award for Excellence (1982); the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art (1985); the Hasselblad Foundation Photography prize (1994); the Cornell Capa Infinity Award (2005); the Harvard Arts Medal (2011), Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and most recently the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019). In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since its founding in 2007. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Acumen Fund and the Vera List Center for Arts and Culture in New York.

Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Instituto Moreira Salles.