Dornith Doherty

(b. 1957) Doherty is a photographer from Houston who received her B.A. from Rice University and her MFA from Yale University. She currently resides in Southlake and is a Distinguished Research Professor of Art at the University of North Texas. In 2012 she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to expand and complete a project called Archiving Eden. From 2008 - 18, Doherty travelled to international seed banks in Colorado, England, Brazil, Italy, Russia, Australia and Norway, near the North Pole. These highly secured vaults, set deep underground, are doomsday facilities to store plant life in the event a catastrophic event wipes out the flora on our planet. She collaborated with renowned biologists to photograph the tiny seeds and tissue samples through an electron microscope. She then manipulated the images to create digital collages in a large format that appear at first glance to be works of abstract art.

Doherty’s work has been exhibited at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum of Art, the Tuscson Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Centro de Fotografia Isla de Tenerife, Spain and the Encuentros Abiertos Photography Biennial in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work is in the collections of the MFA Houston; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft. Worth, Texas; the Museum of Fine Arts in Milwaukee; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota; and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, Texas.