Following a mid-career retrospective exhibition of her still-life photographs of specimens collected for scientific study, Kornberg retired from teaching in 2008 as a Professor Emerita at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. She relocated her studio to an outer island in the San Juan archipelago in Washington State. Since that time she has been collaborating with two poets, making large-scale, hybrid prints that are photo-based but also incorporate drawing, painting, software artifacts and text.

Kornberg earned an MFA in painting from Indiana University in 1970. In 1980 she took up photography. In the 1990s she began exhibiting large-scale, fiber-based, gelatin silver prints throughout the US and abroad. She has shown work in more than thirty solo exhibitions. 

Kornberg is represented in several important collections including those of the Henry Art Gallery, Houston Museum of Art, International Center for Photography,  Princeton Art Museum,  Portland Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum; and the American Embassy in Belize.  Her work has been featured in several book publications including Contemporary Art in the Northwest, 100 Artists of the West Coast, and Selected Works of the Portland Art Museum, Selections from the Collection.  

Four books of her work have been published:  Field Notes, Photographs by Dianne Kornberg, The Art Gym 2007, with an essay by Terry Toedtemeier; India Tigers, William James & Co. 2009, with an afterword by Kim Stafford;  Madonna Comix with poet Celia Bland, Media F8 2014, with an Introduction by Luc Sante; and Bindle with poet Elisabeth Frost, Richochet Editions 2015, with essays by  Prudence F. Roberts and Rachael Blau DuPlessis.