She began her college studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, but dropped out after a year and a half, choosing to transfer to the State University at Albany where she received a B.A.
In 2003, Marisa moved to San Diego, CA and worked in the Education Department at the Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA) for four years.
In 2009, during graduate school, Scheinfeld began to document the remains of her hometown region – searching for any relics of the Borscht Belt she could find.
writes, "The book notes Woody Allen's quip, no doubt delivered at some point from a Borscht Belt stage: "Eighty percent of success is showing up."
Some might say that Scheinfeld arrived half a century too late, but her photos reveal that she showed up just in time to discover mutable beauty in tumbledown dreams."
The Jerusalem Post (2016) wrote, "The era of the Catskills as a popular vacation spot for East Coast Jews continued through the 1970s, although a few hotels and resorts still functioned into the ’90s.
On The Borscht Belt, Tablet Magazine Marjorie Ingall for Tablet Magazine writes, "The Borscht Belt is full of lush, mysterious, mournful, sometimes oddly funny photos: crumbling walls, graffiti-filled pools, rusted swings and basketball hoops, stacks of webbed nylon pool lounges crabbed like spider legs; children’s toys half-submerged in murky water, bits of bird skeleton and detritus on industrial carpet, a scattering of festive red, white and blue poker chips on scrabbled ground.
There are lovely, melancholy essays by Scheinfeld herself, writer Stefan Kanfer and historian Jenna Weissman Joselit (whose meditation on the resorts’ old chairs is damn near virtuosic)."
The family histories of several generations of New York-area Jews feature important episodes that took place at Borscht Belt resorts, but changing demographics and tastes made it impossible for even so famous a vacation destination as Grossinger's to survive.
Marisa Scheinfeld grew up in the region, and since 2009 has been documenting the physical decay of Grossinger's, the Palms Country Club, the Tamarack Lodge, the Fur Workers’ Resort, the Nevele Grande Hotel, and others.
Strips of insulation drop from ceilings; moss and fern sprout from moist carpets; graffiti and plunder deface grand spaces.
Some photographs also seem to be commenting on earlier vanity or vulgarity: In one, bar stools with turquoise cushions stand in a row like shunned roués, rusting in the wreckage.
Marisa Scheinfeld, a photographer documenting this almost apocalyptic transformation, says, "The decay and return of the wild is almost as opulent and lavish as the hotels were in their prime.
* Marisa has been part of group exhibitions at The Midwest Center for Photography, The Ben Uri Gallery at The London Jewish Museum of Art.
"[4] A 2014 article[5] from Newsweek by Abigail Jones describes the exhibition as ..the show is haunted by the detritus of what once was: the missing people, the abandoned activities, the desolate places that at one time buzzed with life.