Miranda Meyer was born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa. She began her photography career as a girl, taking pictures of the family cats with a 110 Instamatic. She bought her first real 35mm camera when she was 15, with money she had earned detasseling corn. She majored in art and photography at the University of Iowa. Her favorite course was one in which she and her classmates walked around studying trees. After graduating she worked as a photographer for the Michigan City News-Dispatch and the Cedar Rapids Gazette, but grew tired of being assigned to chase tornadoes, of which she is deathly afraid. From there she went on to work as a staff photographer for the University of Iowa. After her department closed she began her own freelance work.

Though Miranda enjoys photographing many different subjects, her principal interest is flowers. She strives to capture and elucidate intricate structures and surface textures, and, in her best work, subverts expectations to discover characteristics—elegance, dignity, pathos, shyness—that elude even a close observer. She is careful to avoid sentimentality and sensationalism. She passes on riots of bloom and frames her subjects alone, isolated and vulnerable. Tulips and lilies and irises distill to themselves, revealing an otherworldly beauty, a startling unfamiliarity, as though we are not seeing flowers we have lived with for centuries but strange, luminescent organisms newly-discovered on the ocean floor.