About and Contact
For the past thirty years, Betsy Schneider has been on a quest to photograph the people in her life; her children, family, friends, mentors and strangers with whom she shares traits or life experiences. Her photographic practice could be described as ritualistic and fiercely devoted. Revisiting these relationships over time to capture, preserve, protect and proclaim what it is that we hold sacred. Projects are often long-term endeavors, photographs accumulate over months and years, often resulting in hundreds of images creating meaning through repetition and time.
Schneider’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of many notable collections. In 2011 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and her book To Be Thirteen a result of that fellowship was published by Radius in 2017. Her recent work explores the dimensions of her own identity through photo/video portraits that explore common experiences and traits, defining herself through connections and commonalities with others. Among them are Carrot Tops Are Green!! a series of interviews and portraits of people with red hair, The Best Girl on the Team consists of 50 interviews and portraits with people who have been the only girl on a sports team and b.1965 (working title) a one year quest to photograph and talk to others during the year of the their 60th birthday. She is a founder of FotoFika which hosted Covid era workshops helping people teach photography online and creating the FotoFika All Stars, a set of cards that was the result collaboration between 300 photography students from the class of 2020 and 132 curators and museum professionals and has been collected by MOMA, the ICP and the Center for Creative Photography.
Schneider holds a BA from the University of Michigan, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. Since 2002 she has been on the faculty at the School of Art at Arizona State University, in 2016 she moved to the Boston area while continuing to work for ASU as remote faculty where she designed, developed and currently directs one of the only full-online photography BFA programs in the country. She also currently teaches in person Emerson and Amherst Colleges.
CONTACT
betsy(at)betsyschneider.com