Emily Schiffer received her BA in Fine Art and African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2005, she founded the My Viewpoint Youth Photography Initiative on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, where she continues to teach and shoot.

Awards include: the 2010 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Portraiture, the 2010 winner of the PDN Photo Annual Personal Project Category, first prize in the 2010 IPA awards: People/ Children category,  the 2009 Inge Morath Award, presented by Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, and a 2006-2007 Fulbright Fellowship in Photography. Emily has exhibited her photographs internationally.

Publications include: Smithsonian Magazine, PDN, The Raw File, Verve Photo, and BURN Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan, Foto Baryo, Philippines, and The Center for Fine Art Photography, US. Emily is based in Brooklyn New York but will spend most of 2011 in Cameroon and France.