Marisa Scheinfeld

Marisa Scheinfeld is a Jewish-American photographer and author who was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1980 and raised in the Catskills. She received her B.A. from the State University at Albany in 2002, and her MFA from San Diego State University in 2011. Her work is motivated by an interest in regional landscape and its myriad histories, both apparent and hidden, and a drive to use the medium of photography as an act of preservation.

Marisa’s photographic projects and books are among the collections of the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, The Center for Jewish History, The National Yiddish Book Center, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art & Life at UC Berkeley, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and The Edmund and Nancy K. Dubois Library at the Museum of Photographic Arts. Her work has appeared in publications such as National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Forbes, Paper Magazine, Village Voice, the American Historical Association and American Photography.

In the fall of 2016, Cornell University Press released her first book The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland.  In late 2022, Marisa founded the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project, a non-profit historic preservation initiative that marks and interpret places important to the Catskill’s Borscht Belt era, which had a tremendous impact on American Jewish life and American culture. The project involves the creation of a large-scale historic marker trail, curated public programming, and a self-guided audio driving tour that spans two-counties in the Catskills.

Marisa is also working on her second book which explores hidden, alternative and fringe histories of the Catskills and Hudson Valley, to be published by Cornell University Press in 2026.