After her graduation from the University of Michigan in 1987, she studied and received a second bachelor's degree in film and photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1990, from 1993 to 1995, she worked as an assistant to photographer Sally Mann she earned an MFA from Mills College in 1997.
[2] and over the next four years completed To Be Thirteen, a project consisting of videos and view camera portraits of 250 Thirteen-Year olds from around the US.
The work is a traveling exhibition that originated at the Phoenix Art Museum in 2018, a book published by Radius Books and includes an essay by Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, as well as a 55 minute film, Triskaidekaphobia.
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 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.