Carla van de Puttelaar (b. 1967, Zaandam, The Netherlands) is the Creator/Owner/Initiator and Photographer/Artist of Artfully Dressed: Women in the Art World. In 2019 she produced the book on the project and (co-)curated and co-organized several exhibitions over the years. She lives and works in Amsterdam. In 1996, she graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In the same year she was awarded the Esther Kroon Prize, and in 2002 she won the Prix de Rome Basic Prize. Her photographic work has gained worldwide recognition, and she has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries around the world. Her work has appeared in many publications including five monographs. Carla works for internationally acclaimed magazines and publishers such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Random House. The cover that she did for The New York Times Magazine in 2015 was selected as one of their best photos of the year. Her work is present in many public and private collections around the world.

In 2016 Carla van de Puttelaar created ‘The Rembrandt Series’ in collaboration with the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, which also organized an exhibition of this series in the spring of 2016, alongside their exhibition on Rembrandt’s Nudes. To date eight monographs of her work have been published. In January 2018 Carla was a Jury member for the World Press Photo Contest. She was a member of the selection committee for the Dutch Portrait Prize (DNP) in 2017 and 2018 and in 2019 she was a jury member in the DNP. In 2019 she was Awarded the Zilveren Camera 1st prize, category: Portraits. In the same year five portraits from the Women  in the Art World series have been acquired by The National Portrait Gallery in London through a generous grant from the Bern Schwartz Family Foundation. In 2020 she had a retrospective show entitled: Brushed by Light at the National Museum of History and Art in Luxembourg.

Carla has taught Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She published several articles on Dutch portraiture of the seventeenth century in Oud Holland and in several exhibition catalogues. In 2012 she was granted a Research Support Grant by the Paul Mellon Centre in London for her research on the Scottish portrait painter David Scougall (1625-1685). Carla van de Puttelaar has been asked regularly to lecture about her photographic work at universities, museums and other venues around the world, and about the subject of her dissertation, such as at the Paul Mellon Centre in London, at the University of Edinburgh and the National Galleries Scotland. In September 2017, she successfully defended her doctoral thesis on Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714 at Utrecht University. Her seminal book based on her PhD was published in 2021 with Brepols Publishers https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503597270-1