Dona Ann McAdams is an American photographer. She was born in Queens, New York, in 1954. She has made photographs for over fifty years. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center for Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She received an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for her performance photography.
Her books include Caught in the Act (Aperture, 1996) and Black Box: A Photographic Memoir (Saint Lucy Books, 2024). Black Box brings together five decades of her photographs. It covers American activism, underground performance art and everyday life. She pairs the images with short reflections she calls ditties. For the photographs she has used an analog Leica M2.
She received a Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In 2025 she received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in Vermont. Since 1983 she has set up community darkrooms in underserved communities and taught people to make and develop their own photographs. She lives on a goat farm in Vermont.
