Rhiannon Adam is a photographic artist whose long-term research projects explore complex narratives grounded in the study of cause and effect, looking at the micro to reflect on the macro urgencies of our time. Weaving together myriad strands, her work focuses on social injustices, marginalized communities, and abuses of power, traversing the fine lines between utopia and dystopia, reality and fiction. While rooted in photography, these explorations extend to deep archival excavation, video, audio, and AI, questioning the very nature of the photographic medium.
Adam was born in Cork, Ireland, and later studied at Central Saint Martins and English at the University of Cambridge. Her interest in so-called 'heterotopies' and outsider communities continues to be influenced by her nomadic childhood spent sailing around the world with her parents. Little photographic evidence from this period of her life remained, an absence that sparked her initial interest in photography’s relationship to memory, myth, and truth.
In 2015, supported by the BBC/Royal Geographical Society, Adam spent three months on Pitcairn Island (home of the descendants of the Bounty mutiny) in the South Pacific, producing the first in-depth photographic project about the island. Through the project, she was a Photographers' Gallery New Talent winner in 2019 and the recipient of the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography (2020), culminating in the publication of Big Fence / Pitcairn Island (Blow Up Press, 2022) which became a finalist in the Kraszna Krausz Photography Book Award.
Other published works include Dreamlands, Wastelands (Jane & Jeremy, 2014) and Polaroid: The Missing Manual (Thames & Hudson, 2017; reissued 2022), a definitive guide to instant photography.
Her work has been widely exhibited and published.
In 2021, Adam was selected as the only female crew member from a million applicants for dearMoon, a lunar circumnavigation mission with SpaceX and Elon Musk, funded by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. For three years, the mission consumed her life, until its abrupt cancellation in 2024. The fallout became the subject of her ongoing project, Rhi-Entry; winner of the Creative Category at the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards, and the 2025 Verzasca Foto Festival awards. The project is currently touring, and will soon be the subject of her next book.
