No landscape photographer at work today has done more to focus attention on the spectacular beauty of New England's threatened coastal marshes than Dorothy Kerper Monnelly.  Her body of work has helped inspire a growing movement to protect this fine-tuned, biologically rich ecosystem—long maligned as a wasteland—from human encroachment and irreversible damage.  Legendary naturalist Edward O. Wilson had called her "the Ansel Adams of the wetlands."

Monnelly's connection to the salt marsh is visceral, not intellectual.  For more than 35 years, her life and work on the Massachusetts coast has been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of tidal creeks, the seasonal shifts in the marsh's flora and fauna, and the ever-changing skies illuminating the shifting dunes and prairielike sweep of spartina alterniflora.  For Monnelly, the salt marsh is both artistic muse and spiritual anchor, a place that inspires her work as an artist and grounds her life as a community member, activist, and woman.  Her photography succeeds in evoking this long-overlooked landscape's bracing, mysterious power through visual works that have an abstract, rigorously applied power all their own.

In addition to her widely published, award-winning marsh photography, Monnelly has photographed extensively in the lava fields of Hawaii, the California desert, in Iceland, and in Maine, where she was artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park.  Her large-format gelatin silver prints are in the permanent collections of several major museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and her work has been exhibited in galleries from Maine and New York to Seattle and Hawaii.  A book of her photographs, Between Land and Sea: The Great Marsh (George Braziller, Inc.), won critical praise when it appeared in 2006.

"She shows me the uncommon in the common, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the universe in the pattern."

–Thoreau scholar J. Parker Huber

"Monnelly . . . beautifully captures the spacious tranquility of her subject . . . but her eye extends beyond nature documentation to more painterly, abstract visions: the grainy rhythms of wave-washed sand at Crane Beach and huge tree shadows falling across partly melted and powdery snow."

–Publishers Weekly

"Your photos are just lovely, and the marshes are a noble subject."

–John Updike

Education and Honors:

• Artist-in-Residence, Acadia National Park, ME, 1995
• One of Best of Show awards, juried show, Concord Art Association, 1996, 1997
• First Place, Black and White Landscapes, juried exhibit, The Nature Company, 1991
• John Sexton photography workshop, Aspen, CO
• Audubon A Award (for exceptional action on behalf of the living environment)
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Award (Ipswich Open Space Committee)
• Logo image for Essex County Greenbelt Association
• Ed. M. Harvard Graduate School of Education
• B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, Wheaton Scholar, Wheaton College, MA

Other:

• Board Member, Essex County Greenbelt Association, 1996-2002
• Ecology Committee, The Trustees of Reservations, 1980-2011
• Ipswich Open Space Committee, 1982-2011
• Cantemus Chamber Chorus, 1990-2011