Harriet Zeitlin received a full scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she was a painting major and  participated in a coordinated course with the University of Pennsylvania. This is where she earned a BFA degree while attending two-year course in the Traditions of Painting at the Barnes Foundation. Later she studied printmaking at the University of California, Los Angeles and photography at Santa Monica College. She has lived in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC and Paris.

Zeitlin has had 25 solo shows and exhibited in over 100 group shows, including a display of her artist quilts in the US Department of State Arts in Embassies Program in Hong Kong and Namibia, Africa, a solo show of three decades of her multimedia work at the Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, CA., and a recent exhibition in the Salon d'Automne in Paris.

She won both a California Arts Council Grant and City of Los Angeles Cultural Grant and her work is in numerous public collections including such institutions as the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Zeitlin has also taught art over the years in such venues as Crossroads School, Los Angeles High School for Music and Art, Los Angeles Unified School District Adult Education Program, Mirman School for Gifted Children, and UCLA Extension. In 1998 she also completed book on photography started by her husband titled Shooting Stars: Favorite Photos Taken by Classic Celebrities.