Bea Nettles is an American photographer known for her narrative, often autobiographical approach. Her formal training, in painting and printmaking rather than photography, informs her unconventional, multimedia presentation techniques. In the late 1960s, while still a graduate student, Nettles began to imbue her work with elements associated with women’s work. Drawing from her Grandmother’s quilting techniques, she started to machine stitch directly onto her photographs. Such unconventional, innovative and often then radical approaches to making photographs gained her early recognition.

Bea Nettles has been exhibiting both nationally and internationally since the 1970s. She has had over 50 one-person exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Light Gallery, and Witkin Gallery in NYC .“Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory, a major retrospective” opened in October 2019 at the Sheldon Art Gallery in St Louis, moved to the Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, in January 2020, and concluded at Krannert Art Museum. A book by the same name has been copublished by the Eastman Museum and the University of Texas Press. Her works are iincluded in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada; the Polaroid International Collection; SF MOMA; the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC; the Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY; and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ. Her artists’ books are included in numerous special collections libraries including  the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Syracuse University Libraries, Yale (Beinecke), Washington, and Virginia.