Annegret Soltau attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg from 1967 to 1972, where she studied painting and graphic arts under Hans Thiemann, Kurt Kranz, Rudolf Hausner and David Hockney. In 1982 and from 1989 to 1990, she received a fellowship from the Kunstfonds in Bonn. Considered fundamental for the development of experimental feminist art of the 1970s and 80s, Soltau has received much acclaim for her work. Often, her works appear as an important reference for that early period of feminist art. In 2007, Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first comprehensive exhibition on the foundations of feminist art by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibited her work. In her work, Soltau embraces the body and the spirit as equals. Using black thread, the portraits slice and sew together varying elements of the self: the record and the identity. Each portrait compiles different documents to explore the issues surrounding female identity. The black thread weaves documents—that can either free or constrict a woman—into the portrait of a woman herself. As she sews the identification and credit cards into her own portrait, she reveals the pull between the bureaucratic identity and the true self. She has expressed the complications of identity through performance, photography, video, and photomontage. Soltau currently is a member of Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin, Fotografische Akademie, Leinfelden, and teaches workshops at several universities across Germany, including the University of Design, Offenbach am Main, The International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Salzburg, and the Nürtingen Academy of Art.