Barbara Neustadt (aliases Barbara Walbridge and Barbara Meyer), painter and printmaker, was born in Davenport, Iowa on June 6, 1922, but lived the first six years of her life in New York City. Her childhood was spent in the Chicago area and, at age fourteen, she began taking private art lessons. She graduated from the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. in 1940 and received her B.A. from Smith College in 1944. She furthered her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied for an M.A. degree in History of Culture at the University of Chicago.

In 1952, Neustadt enrolled in classes at the School of Fine Arts, Athens, Ohio, where she studied with Ben Shahn and Arnold Blanch. Later that year she was awarded a scholarship to the Woodstock Art Students league where she studied lithography. In the fall, she moved to New York City where she worked in etching at Atelier 17 and in lithography with Margaret Lowengrund, Bob Blackburn and Michael Ponce de Leon. She was included in the 1959 traveling exhibition, American Prints Today, which was mounted at sixteen museum venues between October 1959 and December 1960.

In 1964, Neustadt moved to Maine and then, in 1967, moved to Woodstock, New York where she founded Pleiades Press / Studio Graphic Art Centre. In 1980 she moved her studio to Bradenton, Florida.

Barbara Neustadt’s printmaking was always experimental and included making and casting paper. She exhibited extensively throughout her career and her work is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, Columbia University in New York, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Barbara Neustadt died in Bradenton Beach, Florida on October 15, 1998.