Natalie Zelt is an educator, sometimes curator, and always historian specializing in art of the United States and histories of photography. She earned her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin just before the pandemic and spent 2021 as a Terra Foundation for American Art Photography Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. Her research and teaching center on the impact of U.S. cultural constructions on the ways that photography gets defined. 

Zelt has worked as a curator independently, as founding member of the anti-racist feminist collective INGZ, and in institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Houston Center for Photography. She is the author of several articles, essays, and chapters on photography and was a co-author of War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2012). She has managed the production of solo and group exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs, and smaller publications.

With Allison Pappas, Zelt currently directs Framing the Field, an independent scholarly project about the institutional establishment of the field of photography in the United States from 1970 - 2001. The book manuscript is in production.

She currently serves as a review editor for Photography & Culture.