1979-

Carrie Schneider is a Brooklyn-based artist working in photography and film. Through photography, Schneider explores the creation of fiction and its tie to truthfulness.

“Representing women friends, many of them artists, writers, and musicians reading women authors sought to undermine this dominant cultural narrative,” Schneider wrote about her series "Reading Women." Beginning in 2012 and continuing through 2014, Schneider photographed 100 women reading other women’s work in their homes. Schneider believed the manner in which she chose to create the work was “key” for the project. She asked New York based friends who were artists (including writers, visual artists, and musicians) to sit silently for a couple of hours while reading a book of their choice in their home or studio. Schneider took their portrait while they were occupied, often near a window, for the historical motif (she sites Vermeer as an example) as well as a practical choice to create a more natural look without the use of artificial lighting. “There is something rare about the depth of concentration that can be experienced while reading, and these are the moments I’m after: where the woman becomes immersed in her text, and begins to lose awareness of the camera, and a pose,” the artist believes. “The history of representing women is so fraught. Representing each woman doing something intellectual, of their own volition, in their own self-defined space was my starting point, as an attempt to do the woman justice in the portrait.” She titles each portrait after the sitter, the author of the book they are reading, its title, and the publication year. “We are entering the era of the end of the printed page!” claims Schneider. “I think there is something physical, visceral about reading a book that is unlike anything else. And again, there is something rare about the depth of concentration that can be experienced while reading. Living in a culture obsessed with speed, ‘progress,’ consumption—these moments of pure immersion, belied by stillness, are rare, political, and powerful.”

Schneider’s exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; santralistanbul, Istanbul; Galería Alberto Sendros, Buenos Aires; and the California Museum of Photography, among others. Awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation NYC Film/Video Grant, and a 2015 Creative Capital Award. Carrie attended Carnegie Mellon University (BFA), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Kuvataideakatemia (Finnish Academy of Fine Arts) in Helsinki, as a Fulbright Fellow, as well as the Whitney Independent Study Program.