Susan Meiselas is an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. She is best known for her work covering social and political issues, particularly in Latin America.
Meiselas was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948. She studied history at Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1969. After college, she moved to New York City and began working as a freelance photographer for magazines such as Esquire and Time.
In 1976, Meiselas traveled to Nicaragua to document the Sandinista revolution. Her photographs of the conflict were published in a book titled Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979 (1981). The book won numerous awards and established Meiselas as one of the leading documentary photographers of her time.
In the 1980s, Meiselas continued to document social issues around the world, including conflicts in El Salvador and Kurdistan. Her work was featured in several books including Carnival Strippers (1976), El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers (1983), and Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997).
Meiselas has also worked on multimedia projects such as Pandora's Box (1995) which explored the lives of strippers in New England; Encounters with the Dani (1998) which documented a tribe living in West Papua; and Prince Street Girls (2003) which focused on teenage girls living on New York City's Lower East Side.
In addition to her photography work, Meiselas has taught at Harvard University, Princeton University, and New York University. She is a member of Magnum Photos and has received numerous awards for her work including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999.