Megan E. Doherty is an award-winning documentary photographer and writer. A recovering academic, she received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2010 and promptly exchanged metaphysics for the even less lucrative world of art. Her multi-year documentary project Back of the Yards won the 2016 Project Development Grant from CENTER, an arts organization that supports socially and environmentally engaged photographic projects—and even got her an invitation for a solo show in Japan. She was co-director of the Seminary Co-op Documentary Project, an independent documentary project on a local bookstore with global renown. Recently, she has focused on reporting stories about chronic illness, medical research, and disability. She was a 2021 fellow at Disability Lead, a leadership institute committed to cultivating a deeper bench of leaders with disabilities who create positive change at the local and national level. 

An unabashed rabbit person, she recently adopted her second shelter bunny, Babar (and still misses Barnaby, who willfully made it to the ripe-old age of 11). She was thrown off a train in Greece, galloped a horse through El Valle de la Muerte, manned the controls of a single engine plane heading back to mainland Iceland from the Westman Islands, almost ran out of gas in the middle of the Atacama desert, hitchhiked in Andorra la Vella, slept on the deck of a boat from Bari to Igoumenitsa, and was nearly killed by a sauna in Finland. She has survived by the grace of qigong, snacks, and the possibility of New Zealand. Megan is not a native of Chicago, IL—but don’t tell her that.