[2] She dedicated herself to the arts from a young age: learning about photography from her father at 9 years old,[3] apprenticing with a painter as a teenager, and later studying fashion design and taking dance, art, and photography classes in New York City.
[4] At Yale University, where she received her MFA in 1981,[4] she met and studied with Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson.
[6][2] The Sackler Gallery in Washington (National Museum of Art) presented a retrospective of her work, Landscape as Culture, in 1994.
[4] Among her other exhibitions were solo shows Asie-la ligne du paysage (1997) in Lausanne, Switzerland, The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (2005) and Twirling the Lotus: Photographs of China and Tibet (2007) in London, Beijing: Unfurling the Landscape (2014) at Australian National University, and A Long View at the Shanghai Center of Photography (2018).
[8] Conner was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grants in 1984 and 1985, which enabled her to photograph in China.