Wijnanda Deroo was born in the Netherlands in 1955.  She received a liberal arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem, where she later became a professor.  In 1989 Deroo was awarded an artist's residency at MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City, NY.  She continues to live and work in New York.

Deroo is well known for her meticulously composed photographs of interiors, in which people are usually absent.  Her earlier series from the 1980s-early 2000s, such as Amsterdam Hotels, Artists' Studios, Atlantic City, Brooklyn Night, Curaçao, Disappearing Houses, Lower East Side, Mobile Homes, New York Eateries, and Dining Sheds of New York acknowledge human presence without showing a single person.

Believing that the greatest visual mysteries and adventures are found in "what is," Deroo photographs human-made spaces and the objects within them exactly as she finds them in existing light (whether daylight or artificial), without external intervention, rearrangement, or other adjustments, thus leaving all details untouched, with all the historical layers visible.  Her work centers on these visual encounters with surprise, stillness, tension, and emotional or psychological states of being.  By capturing the original atmosphere of a space, she allows what is already there to speak its own unique, intriguing language.

Deroo's photographs have been exhibited internationally since the early 1980s.  Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Central Museum, Utrecht; Gemeente Museum, Amsterdam; Groninger Museum, Netherlands; Jewish Museum, New York; LaSalle Bank Photography Collection (Bank of America Collection), Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden; Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Noord Brabants Museum, 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; Printenkabinet, University of Leiden, Netherlands; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among many other public institutions worldwide.