Alysia Steele grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Raised primarily by her paternal grandparents, they taught her structure and accountability.

She attended the Harrisburg Arts Magnet School and focused on photography and visual storytelling. By her junior year of high school, Steele was already winning state photography awards and earning scholarships.

She also earned a spot at the prestigious Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, where she studied photography during the summer at Bucknell University as a teenager.

Steele left college early after a difficult experience at a rural Pennsylvania campus. The environment was isolating, and the experience left a lasting mark. She had earned an associate degree in photography, where she learned studio, food, event, and portrait photography. She later completed her bachelor’s degree in journalism, returning to the same school she once left. The turnaround was significant.

Steele spent years working in daily newspapers. She was part of The Dallas Morning News photo team that earned the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She later became deputy director of photography at another major metropolitan paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In 2015, Steele published Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom. The book combined formal portraits with oral histories of elder Black church women across the Mississippi Delta.

She later completed a Ph.D. in U.S. History, focusing on the Civil Rights Movement and Black women’s labor. 

Alongside her writing, Steele spent more than a decade teaching journalism, multimedia production, podcasting, and layout and design.