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Yolanda Andrade (born 1950, Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico) is one of the most important figures in contemporary Mexican photography. She moved to Mexico City at age eighteen to study theater, though in 1974 began making photographs. In 1976 she left Mexico to attend the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, studying with the influential photographic educator Nathan Lyons. Returning to Mexico City, she was especially interested in using photography to capture the relationship between the city and its peoples. Influenced by American photographers such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand and Mexican photographers such as Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide, Andrade became known for documenting the endless variety of human activity on the street and in different public spaces. Her work is attuned to Mexican cultural traditions as well as the forces of modernity, and she is dedicated to depicting urban inhabitants from a broad spectrum of society. For the first thirty years of her career, she worked in black and white, though since 2003 has explored the creative potential of color and digital photography. An accomplished teacher of photography, Andrade has taught since 1992 at the Escuela de Fotografía Nacho López and Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City and Instituto Tecnológico in Monterrey, Mexico. Among other accolades, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 2004, as well as grants from the Mexican National Endowment for Culture and the Arts. Her work has appeared in ten photographic books, including Los velos transparentes, las transparencias veladas (1988) and Pasión mexicana / Mexican Passion (2002). She has participated in group exhibitions such as the 1st Havana Biennial (1984), Superreal: Alternative Realities in Photography and Video (2013) at El Museo del Barrio in New York, and Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography, 1944–2013 (2014) at the International Center of Photography in New York. Institutions that have collected her work include the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Hokuto, Japan.