Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and her film, From Philadelphia to the Front (2005) which she co-directed and produced with Judy Gelles, traveled to 15 festivals worldwide. Tatted, her monograph of photographs of Philadelphia’s renowned tattoo culture, was published in 2009.
Due South, a project and exchange based in Sicily involving 32 American and International artists- exhibited in 2017 at The Delaware Contemporary in their three main galleries- was her second curatorial project in a quartet: Due North, Due South, Due East, and Due West.
In 2011, The Play House, a nomadic version of The Welcome House, premiered in an installation on Broad Street titled “Not a Vacant Lot”, drawing attention to the 40,000 vacant lots in Philadelphia. The cube traveled in 2012 to Artspace for an installation titled "Beyond What Was" in partnership with Liberty Safe Haven, exploring homelessness and drug addiction (funded by an ArtWorks grant from the NEA). Over time the cube has become more minimal, and is now titled Nomadicube, with 5 interventions produced on the South, North, East and West sides of Chicago (2019-2020) in collaboration with local artists and communities.
That same year, Bernstein was a finalist for the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She completed two artist residencies in Iceland, both in small fishing villages. Work from these residencies were included in the exhibition Due North, which brought together 30 American and Icelandic artists. She was awarded a 2013 Fellowship by the Independence Foundation in the Arts for this work.
In 2009, she conceived and produced The Welcome House in Love Park, Philadelphia in a 10′ transparent cube (an artist residency by day and video installation at night) and Shelter at the Painted Bride (which paired 18 artists with families on the verge of homelessness). In 2010, she conceived and curated The Philadelphia Underground, a site-specific video installation featuring six Philadelphia filmmakers (produced inside and calling attention to the neglected subway concourse underneath Broad Street and City Hall).
In the 1990s in New Haven, CT, she founded untitled(space), The Lot, and co-founded Citywide Open Studios, which incorporated “alternative (empty) spaces” as a call to widen art practices outside of the traditional studio setting.
Bernstein currently lives and works in Chicago and Paris