Marisa Scheinfeld is a Jewish American photographer and author, born in Brooklyn in 1980 and raised in the Catskills of New York. She earned her B.A. from the University at Albany, SUNY, in 2002 and her MFA from San Diego State University in 2011. Her work explores regional landscapes and the layered histories they hold—both visible and obscured—using photography as a form of preservation.

Her photographs are held in the collections of the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Center for Jewish History, National Yiddish Book Center, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley, and the Museum of Photographic Arts. Her work has appeared in publications including National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Forbes, Paper Magazine, Village Voice, the American Historical Association, and American Photography.

In fall 2016, Cornell University Press published her first book, The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland. In the fall of 2022, she co-founded the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project, a multi-faceted initiative that celebrates and cements the famed Borscht Belt era via the creation of a large-scale historic marker trail in the Catskills.

She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Photography at SUNY Purchase and is at work on her second book, co-written with her sister, writer Jillian Scheinfeld, forthcoming from Cornell University Press. Drawing on archival research and site-based exploration, the book explores hidden and overlooked histories, vanished communities, utopian experiments, and countercultures in the Catskills and Hudson Valley.