Artist Bea Nettles is a pioneer in photographic techniques and book arts. She has been exhibiting and publishing her semi-autobiographical works since 1970. She taught photography and artists’ books from 1970-2007 at Rochester Institute of Technology, Tyler School of Art, and the University of Illinois where she is currently Professor Emerita. She has had over fifty one-person exhibitions including the International Museum of Photography at the Eastman House, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Light Gallery and Witkin Gallery in NYC.

Nettles is known for experimenting with alternative photographic processes. She utilizes several photo-mechanical printing techniques such as photolithography and silkscreen.

Nettles' work tackles issues of family relationships, woven together with mythology and natural history, often in dream-like juxtapositions. Like many feminists of her generation, she used her own body to explore the ways in which personal identities also reflected political and social realities. Art historian Jonathan Fineberg wrote that Nettles' 1970 "Suzanna...Surprised," for example, "demonstrated in the uneven brown-stained surface...the defiant subject matter.... She stuffed this unmistakably confrontational nude self-portrait and sewed it around the edges, then fixed it on to a faint image of a formal garden." Of Turning 50(first published in 1995) critic Amber Hares wrote: "What is most noteworthy about Turning 50 is that Nettles, finding beauty in veins as she does in the vines that run up trees, is aging with grace."

In her later career, Nettles has excelled in book arts, teaching classes at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois[1]. She has traveled extensively, leading workshops on book-binding and book arts in Iceland, Italy, and Alaska, to name a few. She has also reflected on her earlier career through new collages and composite images, such as "Return Trips." Art historian Jordana Mendelson wrote of these juxtapositions: "When Nettles reuses a photograph from an earlier work and combines these new works with her mother's poetry, we are reminded of core ideas shared between generations in the Nettles family who have made the creative act an integral part of their lives."

She has published many books, including:

• Flamingo In The Dark (1979)
• Corners: Grace and Bea Nettles (1988)
• Knights of Assisi: Journey through the Tarot (1990)
• The Skirted Garden: Twenty Years of Images (1990)
• Life’s Lessons: A Mother's Journal (1991)
• Complexities (1992)
• Grace’s Daughter (1994)
• Turning 50 (1995)
• Memory Loss (1997)
• Seasonal Turns (1999)
• The Observer, Philadelphia: Borowsky Center for Publication Arts (2005)

• Western July: Summer Instamatics
• Events In Water & Events In The Sky
• The Imaginary Blowtorch
• The Elsewhere Bird
• A is for Applebiting Alligators
• The Nymph of the Highlands
• Swamp Lady
• Dream Pages
• Of Loss and Love
• Lake Lady and Neptune(One-of-a-Kind)
• Ghosts and Stitched Shadows(One-of-a-Kind)
• Padded Parades(One-of-a-Kind)
• B and the Birds: A Collection(One-of-a-Kind)
• Grace Nettles: Poems & Dreams(One-of-a-Kind)
• Escape(One-of-a-Kind)
• Florida Fantasy(One-of-a-Kind)
• Events in the Water(One-of-a-Kind)
• Feasts and Feats(One-of-a-Kind)

Alternative Processes Textbook:

• Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook (3rd edition, 1992)

Print on Demand Books available from LULU.com:

• Cooking the Books: A Concise Guide to Bookbinding (2008)
• Plontu Handbokin: An Artist's Guide to the Wildflowers of Iceland (2008)
• Corners: Grace and Bea Nettles (2nd edition, 2008)
• Return Trips (2009)

Decks of Cards:

• Mountain Dream Tarot, Urbana, IL: Inky Press Productions (1975, 2001)
• 28 Days (1991)
• Mountain Dream Tarot, Melbourne: PAM Books, (2008)

She has received several awards including:

• 1988 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
• 1986 Polaroid Corporation Artists Program
• 1986 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship
• 1979 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
• 1976 New York State Council for the Arts CAPS Grant

Her work is included in over twenty major museum collections including:

International Museum of Photography at Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York.

Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York.

National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.