Born in 1963, Beth Lilly grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. When she ws 10 years old, she tried to rund away from home taking with her nothing but an old twin lens Kodak duoflex. Her childhood ambition was to be fluent in five languages. Watching late night TV, she discovered films like Jean Cocteau's "La Belle et La Bete", Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" andStanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange". These films and others inspired her to make her own films.
She studied film production and screenplay writing as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia and against the advice of college staff, took a photography class her last semester. . She continued studying photography on her own while working a variety of jobs – serving on the film crew of “Friday the 13th: Part 6”, producing radio ads for a Top 40 station, and assisting commercial photographers.
Accepted into the MFA Photography program at Georgia State University,she graduated in1993. She went on to serve as Senior Photo Editor and then Director for the Turner Broadcasting photography department until 2002, when she left to concentrate on her own artwork.
Recent exhibits include the Columbus Museum of Art, a solo show at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the "Movers and Shakers" show at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Woodstock Center for Photography, and Vanderbilt University. Her photographic work has been reviewed in Arts Papers and published in The Photo Review and Atlanta Magazine.
Permanent collections include MOCA GA, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Eleanor D Wilson Museum, and the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund.
