Susan Meiselas was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948 and received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University.
Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs, culminating in the celebrated project, Carnival Strippers.
She is one of the world’s foremost documentary photographers, best known for her coverage of human rights issues in Latin America—notably the insurrection in Nicaragua—as well as her portraits of those living on the periphery of society. Meiselas joined Magnum in 1976.