Arthur Leipzig was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918. After studying photography at the Photo League in 1942, he became a staff photographer for The Newspaper PM, where he worked for the next four years. During this period, he completed his first photo essay, on children's street games.

After a short stint at International News Photos, he became a freelance photojournalist, traveling on assignments around the world, contributing work to such periodicals as The Sunday New York Times, This Week, Fortune, Look, and Parade. Edward Steichen encouraged him to teach, which he did for twenty-eight years at Long Island University.

Leipzig has been included in many museum exhibitions, most notably New Faces (1946) and Edward Steichen's landmark Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Photography as a Fine Art in 1961 and 1962.
He has had one-man exhibitions at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Photofind Gallery, Frumkin Adams Gallery, The Howard Greenberg Gallery, The Hillwood Museum, The Museum of the City of New York and The Columbus Museum of Art.

Works by Arthur Leipzig are represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., the Jewish Museum, New York City, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, the Folkwang Museum Essen.

Leipzig has published three books:
On Assignment with Arthur Leipzig, Long Island University, New York 2005;
Growing Up in New York, Boston 1995 and
Sarah’s Daughters: A Celebration of Jewish Women, Women’s American ORT, 1988.


Arthur Leipzig lives in Sea Cliff, Long Island.