Sarah Hadley was born in Boston and studied both art history and photography at Georgetown University and the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC. She spent time in her 20's studying and working at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Biennale in Venice, Italy, where she first started photographing seriously. She worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress and as a photojournalist for a newspaper in Virginia before moving to Chicago in 1996, where she founded the Filter Photo Festival.