A self-employed creator of custom-made furniture, Mark Luedeman has cultivated a career that includes lengthy tenures as both a self-employed interior woodwork installation carpenter and a self-employed photographic set builder. Before going into business for himself in 1990, he worked four years as a photo assistant with a variety of professional freelance photographers based in New York City. It was while working as a photo assistant that Mark Luedeman first began to build photographic sets, the scenic backgrounds that are placed behind human subjects during photo sessions.

Many of Mark Luedeman’s artistic efforts are influenced by his lifelong love of nature. His first constructions were crude forts that he built in a tree-covered ravine in the back of his childhood home. He is also inspired by the designs of the art deco period.

In the late 2000s, his appreciation of the natural world and his sadness at seeing the large amounts of litter that the melting snow reveled led him to begin cleaning up stretches of roadway in his current hometown of Beacon, New York. These activities led legendary folk singer and conservationist Pete Seeger to stop and thank Mark Luedeman for his efforts after noticing him cleaning up the roadside.