Betsy Schneider

Betsy Schneider is an American photographer who lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona.

After her graduation from the University of Michigan in 1987, she studied and received a degree in art and photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1990, and later a graduate degree from Mills College in 1997. From 1993 to 1995, she worked as an assistant to photographer Sally Mann.

After graduating from Mills in 1997, she moved to London where she lived for four years, and had her daughter Madeleine, and frequently had exhibitions in Northern Europe and England. In 2001, she moved to Norway where her son Viktor was born, and in 2002 she moved to Tempe, Arizona, accepting a position on the faculty in the School of Art at Arizona State University.

In 2004, her photography caused some controversy in the UK when the police received complaints about nude photographs of her daughter, on display in Spitz Gallery in a group exhibition, "Inventories", an exhibition of four artists whose work addressed family photography. The images were part of a series of pictures from a body of work entitled Quotidian and consisted of three 63-day blocks of daily images of her daughter from birth to nine weeks, two years and five years old. The artist herself was somewhat taken aback by the reaction to her photos and was quoted in the Guardian as saying:

The aim of these pictures is not to provoke or to shock. The idea is to show time, change and growth.

Her work continues to address issues of childhood, but also extends to issues of the body, time, consumption and human relations. In 2011 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.