A 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Dornith Doherty is an American artist working primarily with photography, video, animations, works on paper, and scientific imaging. In projects that interweave the evidentiary and metaphoric powers of photographic images, Doherty illuminates ecological and philosophical issues that are often neglected when considering human entanglements in the environment. This has led to her many collaborations with scientists, archives, botanical centers, and research institutes concentrating on environmental themes to create artworks that use the beautiful intricacy of the natural world to inspire conversations around, and support for, the protection of a distant and unknowable future.
Doherty was born in Houston, Texas and received a B.A. cum laude from Rice University and a MFA in Photography from Yale University. She currently resides in Southlake and is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas, where she has been on the faculty since 1996. In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, she has also received grants from the Fulbright Foundation (Mexico), the Japan Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the United States Department of the Interior, the University of North Texas, and the Houston Center for Photography. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto/Ontario Science Centre, the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, and Joshua Tree National Park. She was an artist affiliate at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas from 2021-2024. Doherty received the Honored Educator Award from the Society of Photographic Education South Central Conference in 2012 and, more recently, the Texas Legislature named her 2016 Texas State Artist 2D.
Doherty’s work is in numerous permanent collections, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; the Brandt Museum, Denmark; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, Boston, MA; the Federal Reserve Bank, Houston, TX; Frontier Science & Technology Research Foundation, Boston, MA; the Kings Park Biodiversity Conservation Centre, Perth, Western Australia; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.; the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX; and the Yale University Library, New Haven, CT, among others.
Doherty’s work has been written about extensively, including a monograph, Archiving Eden (2017).