About the Artist: Dona Ann McAdams

Dona Ann McAdams was born in Queens, New York, in 1954, and grew up in Lake Ronkonhoma. McAdams studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. She received an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Rutgers University and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Empire State College.

McAdams’ photography has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center for Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, Robert Miller Gallery, and Primavera Fotográfica a Barcelona, among other venues. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou and Bibliothèque nationale de France.

McAdams has received grants from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Polaroid Foundation, and the New York State Council of the Arts. Her many awards include the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize given by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, a Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement in Performance Documentation, and an Obie Award for Distinguished Contribution to Off-Broadway theatre. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The London Times, The Chicago Tribune, Time, Newsweek, Stern, Doubletake, and Aperture. Her book of performance photography, Caught in the Act, was published by Aperture.

Since 1983 McAdams has been committed to bringing cameras and photography into marginalized and under-served communities. She has built community darkrooms and taught photography inside New York City homeless shelters and day programs for people living with severe mental illness, on the backstretch of a thoroughbred race track, and inside a small farming community in West Virginia. In 2010 she collaborated with Maurice Sendak and Lynn Caponera to establish the Sendak Fellowship, a residency program for people who tell stories with illustration. She lives on a goat dairy farm in southwestern Vermont.

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