Leonie Reisberg, born in 1955 in Melbourne, pursued a two-year Photography program at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology 1972—3, before switching to the more fine art-oriented course at Prahran College of Advanced Education 1974—5. After a brief period of teaching, she undertook a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the U.S.A.

Graham Howe, a fellow Prahran alumnus, included her work in his 1974 New photography Australia : a selective survey, published through the newly founded Australian Centre for Photography.

Returning to Melbourne in 1978, Reisberg initially worked as a graphic designer before relocating to Adelaide in 1979. In Adelaide, she lectured in Photography at Torrens College, and expanded her imagery with experiments in sequences, hand-colouring, collage and colour printing. Her subject matter was her own life, as Christine Godden noted in her major essay ‘Photography in the Australian Art Scene’ in the summer issue of Art and Australia in 1980;

“The personal is as much a subject for picture-making as the public issue. Robert Ashton, Godwin Bradbeer, Bill Henson, Leonie Reisberg and Jillian Gibb, for example, usually work in this area.”

Her contributions to the field were recognised in 1982 when the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council awarded her a participation fee through their regional development program for a national touring exhibition the Project Gallery exhibition Re-constructed Vision: Contemporary work with photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Contemporary work with photography 25 July to 23 August, 1981. It was curated by leading Australian photohistorian and gallery director Gale Newton, with the ambition;

“…to mark the then recent and rapid evolution of varied mixed media or manipulated practice by a new generation of art photographers. The exhibition also aimed to chart how photographic images were being used by other media graphic and conceptual artists – hence the presence of some print-makers. A West Coast American embrace of mixed media had played its part on photographers and print makers and European and American trends in installation and performance artists use of photographic documentation… I found the works were elegant and powerful with an energy and a sense of freedom to seek poetic narrative elements and the expression of emotion in images. It has been fascinating to see how most of the photographer contingent have sustained their creativity over the ensuing three decades. I am not sure that the exhibited works count as postmodernism per se but these artists were certainly precursors. There was almost no interpretative commentary in the original small catalogue.”

Throughout the 1990s, Leonie Reisberg exhibited both nationally and internationally, and her work found  a place in major collections in Australia and overseas, and in notable shows including Here there and back again in 1981 and the 1983 National Photographic Exhibition.

Her impact is evident in her participation in the 1997 Flatlands: photography and everyday space at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the 2014 exhibition Wildcards: Bill Henson Shuffles The Deck at Monash Gallery of Art (now the Museum of Australian Photography, MAPh) for which Henson paired Reisberg’s Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Tasmania  and Beverley Veasey’s Study of a Calf, Bos taurus.

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In 2022 a retrospective of her work Leonie Reisberg – A history in the making, was held at Manning Regional Art Gallery.

Leonie’s  works have been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.