Sandy Skoglund was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1946. Her family moved around frequently, following the path of her father working in a large multinational corporation. The early years were spent in New England, and then later they moved to California, where Skoglund graduated from high school.

Skoglund studied studio art and art history at Smith College from 1964-68. As a Junior Year Abroad student to France in 1966-67, Skoglund studied Art History at the Sorbonne and immersed herself in avant-garde cinema, including the French New Wave and Italian NeoRealism that dominated at that time. In 1968, upon graduating from college, Skoglund taught art at Batavia Junior High School in Batavia, Illinois, in order to earn the money to pay for graduate school. One year later, in 1969, Skoglund went on to the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she studied painting, printmaking, filmmaking, and multimedia, receiving her M.A. in 1971 and her M.F.A. in painting in 1972.

Along with a friend and fellow grad student at Iowa, Skoglund moved to New York in May of 1972, settling at first into the downtown area below Houston Street. She pursued her interest in multi-media, and this morphed into a focus on conceptual art. Skoglund's work at that time involved repetitive gestures with a minimalist philosophy, resulting in images that "made themselves" through accumulation. The idea of duplication and accumulation as a visual strategy is seen in her use of photocopying on a rented xerox machine and her Performance With Jellybeans in 1975. Eventually, Skoglund’s desire to document conceptual ideas led her to teach herself photography. This developing interest in photographic pictorialism became fused with her interest in popular culture and advertising strategies, resulting in a series of food still lifes in 1978 with such titles as Luncheon Meat on a Counter and Peas on a Plate.

In 1980 Skoglund sculpted cats in direct plaster for a postapocalyptic installation and photograph titled Radioactive Cats. With this piece, Skoglund defined for herself a practice of creating sculptures and installations that are arranged for the camera in specific, meticulously wrought compositions. Calling these works photo-tropic, Skoglund also incorporated live models who posed and performed under her direction. This hybrid combination of art forms has made Radioactive Cats one of the defining images of tableau photography from the 1980’s. Skoglund has continued to explore a personal working style and the artistic issues it encompasses to the present day.