Her photographs and videos have been exhibited widely at galleries and museums in the US and abroad, including the Alternative Museum, Camera Club, HarvestWorks, New York, NY, The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, Ann Arbor, Detroit Artists Market, Kresge Art Museum, Lansing, MI, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI, San Francisco Camerawork, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Spaces Gallery, Cleveland, OH, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston Center for Photography, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Museo de la Fotografia, Santa Fe, Argentina, Foto Arte in Brasilia. Recent solo exhibitions include Witzenhausen Gallery in Amsterdam in November 2010 and DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles in May 2010. A 70-page illustrated color catalogue was produced in conjunction with her 2011 survey exhibition, Cynthia Greig: Subverting the (un)Conventional curated by Dick Goody for the Oakland University Art Gallery in 2011.

Public collections with her work include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Smith College Museum of Art, The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Bloomington, IN, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Assignment Earth/Single Image Award (2004) from The Center, Santa Fe, NM, Houston Center for Photography Fellowship (2003), and an artist residency at LightWork, Syracuse NY (2001).

In addition to her own imagemaking, Greig is an avid collector of nineteenth-century photography and, with Catherine Smith, co-authored the book of vintage photographs, Women in Pants: Manly Maidens, Cowgirls and Other Renegades. The concept for the book was inspired by the fictional 19th-century cross-dressing photographer, Isabelle Raymond, a persona performed by Greig both in front of and behind the camera for her installation New Eden. The book chronicles through photographs the less celebrated history of the countless women—actresses, soldiers, lesbians, athletes, adventurers, laborers to name a few—who defied convention and dared to wear trousers long before pants became an accepted clothing option for women. The book was published by Harry N. Abrams in 2003.

Greig received her MFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1995 and also studied filmmaking at the University of Iowa where she received her MA in art history in 1988.