Kristin Schnell is a German photographer, born in 1968. She grew up in the Palatinate region and began her apprenticeship as a photographer at sixteen, and has worked as a freelance photographer since 1995, for many years in Berlin and Hamburg. She later moved to the countryside by the Baltic Sea in northern Germany.
There, faced with the decline of bird populations, she began building and painting colorful sets on which her birds perform. Her first book, Of Cages and Feathers (Kehrer Verlag, 2024), presents birds in captivity as a picture of the cages people build for themselves. She was named to the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2024 and 2025 and was a finalist at the Head On Photo Awards in 2025. She had her first solo exhibition at the Triennial of Photography Hamburg in 2022 and a solo show at Michael Reid Berlin in 2026.
