Virginia Beahan earned a BA in English from the Pennsylvania State University, and an MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

She has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, New England Council for the Arts, and Dartmouth College's Leslie Center for the Humanities and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

Beahan's work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Corcoran, the Smithsonian Museum, San Francisco MoMA, the Fogg at Harvard University, the Art Museum at Princeton University, the MFA in Boston, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, LA County Museum, and the Getty Center. Her photographs have been widely exhibited both nationally and abroad.

A long time educator, Virginia Beahan currently teaches photography in the Department of Studio Art at Dartmouth College, and she resides in New Hampshire with her husband Michael. Her second monograph, Cuba Singing with Bright Tears, was published by Pond Press in 2009.