Dona Ann McAdams

Dona Ann McAdams is an award-winning American photographer known for her powerful documentation of activism, performance art, and marginalized communities over the past five decades. Since the 1970s, she has used photography as a tool to witness, preserve, and engage with social change, capturing pivotal moments in AIDS activism, LGBTQ+ rights, the Culture Wars, and avant-garde theater.

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others. She is the recipient of prestigious awards, including the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Arts Council.

Beyond her role as a photographer, McAdams has been deeply involved in community-based art projects, working with underserved groups such as people in adult homes, shelters, and rural communities to empower them through photography. (Website, Instagram)