Meer Akselrod was born on July 18, 1902 in a shtetl by the name of Maladzyechna, Russian Empire (now in Belarus).

During the First World War his family found refuge in Tambov. It was here that he took his first drawing classes from V. Perelman in 1916. The series "War Refugees", created in the 1920s, was based on memories of this time.

From 1918 to 1919 Akselrod attended school and earned a living drawing billboards in Minsk.

From 1919 to 1920 he served as a draughtsman in the Red Army communications agency.

In 1921 he contributed 36 works to an exhibition of Belorussian artists held in Minsk. That same year the Belorussian People’s Commissariat for Education sent Akselrod to Moscow to study at VKHUTEMAS. From 1921 to 1928 he studied under V. Favorsky, P. Pavlinov, A. Rodchenko and S. Gerasimov.

While living in Moscow, Akselrod visited shtetls and villages in Belarus to create portraits, genre compositions and landscapes.

In 1926 he joined the Moscow-based ‘4 Arts’ society of artists. Akselrod participated in three exhibitions of the society held in Moscow and Leningrad. Fellow contributors included El Lisitsky, P. Kuznecov, M. Saryan, K. Petrov-Vodkin, and K. Istomin.

Between 1928 and 1932 Akselrod taught drawing at VKHUTEIN and the Moscow Textile Institute and created illustrations for several books including Isaac Babel’s "Story of My Dovecote". His works were featured in exhibitions held in Switzerland, Netherlands, France and the US.

In 1930 and 1931 he made multiple trips to the Voyo-Nova (New Way in Esperanto) farming community in Crimea. These visits produced his famous "The Steppe" series of drawings, watercolors and gouaches.

During the mid 1930s Akselrod worked in theatre design for State Jewish Theaters in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk.

When evacuated to Alma-Ata in 1941, Akselrod was invited to join director Sergei Eisenstein's crew producing sketches and fresco paintings for the film Ivan the Terrible (1944) .

Akselrod created landscapes of Alma-Ata, Yany-Kurgan and Kokand and designed sets and costumes for the production of Sholem Aleichem’s The Bewitched Tailor by the Ukrainian GOSET Jewish Theatre, evacuated to Kokand. Akselrod continued illustrating Sholem Aleichem’s works in Moscow, where he returned in 1945.

In the postwar period Akselrod visited a fishing collective farm on the Sea of Azov, produced the Ertelevo series, and did landscapes of Crimea, the Caucasus and Central Russia.

In 1966, Akselrod took part in a retrospective group exhibition in Moscow with M. Gorshman, A. Labas, A. Teneta, and G. Shultz.

During the last years of his life, Akselrod worked on a series of nostalgic landscapes called "Memories of Old Minsk". He did not live to see these paintings exhibited. They were only shown in large posthumous exhibitions held in Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi, New York, Minneapolis and London, in the Israeli museums Yad VaShem and Ein Harod, and in the Museum of Russian Art in Ramat Gan. Akselrod never had a single solo exhibition during his lifetime.

Meer Axelrod died of a heart attack in Moscow on January 10, 1970.

The artist's works reside in the permanent collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum, the State Literary Museum (Moscow), the State Russian Museum (Petersburg), Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in many museums and private collections around the globe.