©Dornith Doherty, Walnut Clones, 2024 from the project, Archiving Eden

Photography Educator is a monthly series on Lenscratch. Once a month, we celebrate a dedicated photography teacher by sharing their insights, strategies and excellence in inspiring students of all ages. These educators play a transformative role in student development, acting as mentors and guides who create environments where students feel valued and supported, fostering confidence and resilience.

For the month of May I am thrilled to spotlight artist and educator Dornith Doherty whose work has profoundly shaped conversations around art, science, and environmental stewardship. My introduction to Dornith’s practice came years ago at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, where I discovered her book, Archiving Eden. This project, which documents global seed banks, captivated me with its blend of scientific rigor and poetic sensitivity. Dornith’s approach is marked by deep collaboration with scientists and research institutions, allowing her to create images that are not only visually compelling but also rich in meaning and context. As a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas, Dornith is equally celebrated for her dedication to teaching. In this article, you’ll find a selection of Dornith’s recent works, reflections and images from her students, and an interview exploring her journey as a passionate educator and innovative photographer-offering a window into the impact of her creative and educational practice.

The following six images are from Dornith’s project, Illuminations: Miradas a los Helechos en Colombia. This project is emerging from a research-based creative collaboration with Dr. Alejandra Vasco. As an artist affiliate at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT), I researched primary source materials housed in the BRIT Library and Herbarium, including Dr. Vasco’s plant voucher specimens from her NSF-funded study of ferns in Colombia. The project documents the present time of urgent plant discovery in an era of ecosystem disruption and social change in Colombia. Illuminations  includes photographs, architectural interventions, and a three-channel video installation. The exhibition of the project in Medellín (June 2024 through November 2024) included twenty-two monumental prints, (10’ x 8’), a sixty-four-foot installation of transparent artworks across the façade of the Jardín Botánico de Medellín’s Administration building, five large collages on glass panels installed in the garden, and a three-channel video embedded into a custom-built vertical fern garden wall. Work in progress 2019-ongoing.

©Dornith Doherty Solo exhibition/Artwork installed at the Medellín Botanic Garden 2024

©Dornith Doherty Translucent window installation at the Medellín Botanic Garden 2024

©Dornith Doherty, Thirty Victims in Eleven Days| Treinta Víctimas en Once Días | Blechnum occidentale L; Illuminations: Ferns of Colombia 2023

©Dornith Doherty, Establishing Wetlands in Inírida| Estableciendo humedales en Inírida| Elaphoglossum papillosum; Illuminations: Ferns of Colombia 2023

©Dornith Doherty, Prepared for the Future | Preparado para el futuro |Parablechnum lechleri; Illuminations: Ferns of Colombia 2023

©Dornith Doherty, Buy your Collection |  Compra Tu Colección |Diplazium sp., 2024

Dornith has been on the faculty at the University of North Texas since 1996 and teaching photography for over thirty-five years.

ES: What keeps you engaged as an educator?

DD: I love working with students and keeping up to date with the way the field of photography and related practices have expanded over time. (I’ve been teaching photography since 1988; first at Herron School of Art, IUPUI in Indianapolis, and then at the University of North Texas since 1996.) The University of North Texas is a large state school with a well-respected studio art program that attracts fantastic students. My students are amazing, and I love working with them – many have overcome a wide range of economic and social challenges to pursue study the university. I am filled with gratitude for their enthusiasm, talent, dedication, and grit.

ES: Has your personal work been affected by your teaching experience? How?

DD: Yes, the academic influence appears in a few ways from working across fields and having a range of professional colleagues and friends with really interesting research interests. It has also influenced how I structure projects. My most notable project, Archiving Eden, documents seed vaults across five continents. Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, I have photographed over twenty seed banks, including the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It’s hard to work in the field during the academic semester, so my approach is to capture as many images as I can while on site thereby creating an archive that I can work on in my studio that allows me to continue working.

ES: Did you have an influential photography mentor or teacher? What was their biggest impact on you?

DD: I had several very impactful photography mentors; Geoff Winningham at Rice University and Richard Benson and Tod Papageorge at Yale. All three of these very talented artists led by example;  individually, they demonstrated a passionate commitment to making meaningful work while teaching. As I think about this question, it occurs to me that they had other commonalities;  they worked in long form projects, and their practices were informed by a deep literary and cultural  understanding.

ES: How do you help your students tap into curiosity and the creative process?

DD: In my classes, I encourage students to study and reflect upon the creative process while they are making new work. In addition to showing contemporary and historic artists like most professors do, I assign readings that focus on research related to creativity. Recently, I’ve added the Louisiana Museum’s “advice to the young” artist interviews which is very inspiring and is not as dry as research papers. I ask them to track their creative process through weekly capture assignments that are paired with written reflections. For example, I’ll ask the students to come up with several ideas at the beginning of the semester. I encourage them to reflect on the circumstances when they had their ideas, evaluate their satisfaction with the ideas over time, and ask them how they might refine them. I encourage them to keep a written (digital or paper) journal. As the semester progresses, they can track the evolution of their ideas in real time. They are also encouraged to research other artists who share their concerns.

ES: How and where do you find inspiration?

DD: My artistic concerns are the ecological, philosophical, and cultural questions emerging from human stewardship of our rapidly changing environment. This has led my photographic practice towards collaborative, research-based projects with scientists, archives, botanical centers, and research institutions focused on the preservation of biodiversity and enhancing environmental resilience. I am inspired by the importance of the efforts to address our environmental crisis, and I find that working on a variety of related projects is very inspiring. Over time, I’ve made lasting friendships with the people who I’ve worked with and that has led to an ever-expanding circle of friends and artistic possibilities.

From Dornith’s students.

Dornith Doherty was my major professor while in graduate school at the University of North Texas, and under her guidance I was able to push my artistic voice from a straight documentary photographer to a photo based mixed media artist. This shift in process allowed me to fully express my artistic voice and layer into the works; history, ancestry and cultural significance. I jokingly refer to Dornith as my “Shero,” but as they say, behind every joke there is truth. Dornith has not only been my professor, but my inspiration.  In my eyes, she set the bar for what an artist, a wife, a mother, and a professor can be and do. As she has and continues to pour into my life, I have taken up the mantle and hope to set the bar for the next generation.
Letitia Huckaby
Instagram: @huckabystudios  Website huckabystudios.com

©Letitia Huckaby Installation Images from the series “A Living Requiem,” at the Fort Worth Modern. Images by Kevin Todora

©Letitia Huckaby Installation Images from the series “A Living Requiem,” at the Fort Worth Modern. Images by Kevin Todora

Dornith Doherty was my undergraduate Professor from 2004 – 2006. Despite only working together for two years, she was pivotal in establishing a curiosity for image making as well as a commitment to engaging within the broader arts community in the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex. Over the last twenty years Dornith has been an invaluable mentor, coaching me though academic complexities as well as continuing to champion my work.
Rachel Cox
Instagram: @rayraycox Website: Rachelcoxphotography.com

©Rachel Cox, Notes On Care

©Rachel Cox, Notes On Care

These next two images are from Dornith’s Archiving Eden:Exchange project.
This an interactive installation expressing the monumental collaborative effort of safeguarding biodiversity. I created more than 5,200 magnified X-ray images of California wildflower seeds to cover a transparent structure with a colorful mosaic inspired by a map of the impervious surfaces in Los Angeles County. With Archiving Eden: Exchange, viewers are encouraged to examine their responsibility in caring for the environment. I invite the public to remove and keep an X-ray tile from the wall and exchange it with a single seed provided by the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants during seed exchange events. Over the course of the exhibition (September 2024-January 2025), the installation transformed into a living seed bank containing enough seeds to save a species. 

©Dornith Doherty Archiving Eden: Exchange Installation at the Los Angeles Arboretum 2024-2025 (Last Day, seed bank complete)

©Dornith Doherty Archiving Eden Exchange Installation at the Los Angeles Arboretum 2024-2025

The next four images are from Archiving Eden.
Archiving Eden is an ongoing long-term project for which I received a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. The project has a dual nature; one facet of the project focuses on documentary photographs of seed banks around the world, and the other facet of the project includes videos, animations and works on paper created from x-rays of botanical specimens from the collections. The documentary images explore the role of seed banks and their preservation efforts in the face of climate change, the extinction of natural species, and decreased agricultural diversity. Work in progress 2008-present.

©Dornith Doherty California Botanic Garden Seed Bank Freezers, 2025 from the project, 2025 Archiving Eden

©Dornith Doherty California State Botanic Garden Seed Bank Seed Cleaning Station from the project, 2025 Archiving Eden

©Dornith Doherty, Batata I 2023 from the project, Archiving Eden

©Dornith Doherty. Video still from Roundabout (Circuition) single channel video, 3 minutes © 2021 Animation created from CT scans of diverse indigenous American grapevine rootstock. From the project: Roundabout (Circuition).

Thank you Dornith for your unwavering commitment to your students and your work.

About Dornith
A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, Dornith Doherty received her MFA in Photography from Yale University and serves as Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas. Her honors include grants from the Japan Foundation, and the United States Department of the Interior; and artist residencies at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto/Ontario Science Centre, the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, and Joshua Tree National Park. She was named 2016 Texas State Artist of the year, received the Honored Educator Award from the Society for Photographic Education South Central Chapter, and earned the Society for Photographic Education 2025 Insight Award.

Doherty’s work has been exhibited widely in the US and abroad including solo exhibitions at the National Academy of Sciences, the Los Angeles Arboretum, and the Medellín Botanic Garden. Curated exhibitions include Unsettled Natures: Artists Reflect on the Age of Human, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Seedscapes: Future-Proofing Nature at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Seeds of Resistance, Broad Museum, Michigan; New Territory: Landscape Photography Today, Denver Art Museum, Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World, Spencer Museum of Art, and State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Website: dornithdoherty.com
Instagram: @dornithdoherty

Upcoming Exhibitions:
In the Pool:On Influence, June 26 – October 26, 2025 at MoCA CT. This is a group exhibition of forty Guggenheim Fellows that studied with Tod Papageorge and accompanies a solo exhibition of his work titled Tod Papageorge: At the Beach.

©Dornith Doherty, Sori

Elizabeth Stone is a Montana-based visual artist exploring potent themes of memory and time deeply rooted within the ambiguity of photography. Stone’s work has been exhibited and is held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, NC, Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT, Candela Collection, Richmond, VA, Archive 192, NYC, NY and the Nevada Museum of Art Special Collections Library, Reno, NV. Fellowships include Cassilhaus, Ucross Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Jentel Arts, the National Park Service and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts through the Montana Fellowship award from the LEAW Foundation. Process drives Stone’s work as she continues to push and pull at the edge of what defines and how we see the photograph.
Website
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Bluesky