Susan Meiselas

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. Carnival Strippers was originally published in 1976 and a selection of the photographs 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 documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. She published her second monograph, Nicaragua, in 1981. Meiselas served as an editor and contributor to the book El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers and edited Chile from Within featuring work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime. She has co-directed two films, Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family and Pictures from a Revolution with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. 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 and developing akaKurdistan, an online site of exchange for collective memories in 1998. Her monograph Pandora’s Box explores a New York S&M club, has been exhibited both at home and abroad. Encounters with the Dani reveals a sixty-year history of discovery and interactions with outsiders, the Dani, an indigenous people in the highlands of Papua in Indonesia. 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 numerous awards since 1979 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992.