Jo-Anne McArthur is an award-winning photographer, author, and sought-after speaker. Through her long-term body of work, We Animals, she has documented our complex relationship with animals around the globe. Since 1998, her work has taken her to over sixty countries. In 2019 she founded We Animals Media.

McArthur’s books include HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene (We Animals Media, 2020), with co-editor Keith Wilson; Captive (Lantern Books, 2017); and We Animals (Lantern Books, 2014). Thousands of her images are available in the We Animals Archive searchable database.

McArthur was the subject of the critically acclaimed 2013 documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine, which followed her as she documented the plight of abused and exploited animals and advocated for their rights as sentient beings.

McArthur’s photography and writing has been in publications such as National Geographic and National Geographic Traveller, The Washington Post, The Guardian,  Lens Culture, Medium, VICE, the LA Times, Canadian Geographic, DAYS Japan, Helsingin Sanomat, Der Spiegel, PhotoLife magazine, Huffington Post, Outdoor Photography, and Feature Shoot. In addition, We Animals images have been used by hundreds of organizations, publishers and academics to advocate for animals.

Recent awards include 2020 Nature Photographer of the Year, Man and Nature category winner; 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, photojournalism category; Italy’s Festival of Ethical Photography award, Single Shot; Austria’s Alfred Fried Peace Award in 2018; and the 2017 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, People’s Choice category.

McArthur speaks internationally at schools, universities, and conferences on the subjects of photography, the human-animal relationship, social change, and empathy. Recent keynote speaking engagements have included the Norwegian Photography Festival, the GDT Nature Photography Festival, the Minding Animals conference in Mexico, the Civic Journalism Lab at Newcastle University, England, Animal Legal Defense Fund conferences, Humane Canada’s annual animal welfare conference in Calgary, Canada, and at Harvard Law school. In 2018, McArthur was also a visiting scholar at the University of British Colombia’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies.

She hails from Toronto, Canada.