Margaret Sartor was born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana. She currently teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and lives with her husband, Alex Harris, and their two children in Durham, North Carolina.

Sartor's most recent book, MISS AMERICAN PIE: A DIARY OF LOVE, SECRETS, AND GROWING UP IN THE 1970'S, is a memoir of adolescence based on the diaries and notebooks she kept as a girl. It tells a compelling, frank, often poignant and frequently humorous story, delving into the same emotional and geographic territory that Sartor has been depicting in photographs for almost two decades.

Margaret Sartor's photographs of her hometown and family have appeared in a number of photographic books, including IN THEIR MOTHERS' EYES, edited by Martina Mettner; BLACK: A CELEBRATION OF CULTURE, edited by Deborah Willis; THE SPIRIT OF FAMILY by Al and Tipper Gore; and A NEW LIFE: STORIES AND PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE SUBURBAN SOUTH, edited by Alex Harris and Alice George. Her work has been published in periodicals, including Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, Harpers, New Yorker, Oxford American, and The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, and is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Mead Art Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as several private collections.

As an editor, Sartor has published three books about photography and art: GERTRUDE BLOM: BEARING WITNESS, edited by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris; THEIR EYES MEETING THE WORLD, by Robert Coles and edited by Margaret Sartor; and WHAT WAS TRUE: THE PHOTOGRAPHS AND NOTEBOOKS OF WILLIAM GEDNEY, edited by Margaret Sartor and co-edited by Geoff Dyer. WHAT WAS TRUE was chosen as one of the "Top Ten Photography Books of 1999" by the Village Voice.

Sartor has curated exhibitions of photography at the International Center for Photography in New York, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.