When I contacted McAdams in March to set up an interview for this story, she emailed the following reply: “I’m just in the barn. I’m having baby goats right now, but I can talk to you…” Later, “We have 4 kids out of two does.” She and her partner, novelist Brad Kessler, live on Northern Spy Farm in Sandgate, Vermont; they’re licensed cheesemakers, selling their cheese at carefully selected shops around the state.
McAdams was born in 1954 and grew up on Long Island, in the working-class town of Lake Ronkonkoma in Suffolk County, New York. She lived with her parents and two younger brothers in a tract house. Her mother, a dental assistant, paved the way for Dona to work in dentists’ offices. “My first photos were of teeth,” she writes—but her talent and vision rapidly expanded.
Self Portrait, Empire State Building, 1981. Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams.
Text accompanying the above photo in McAdams’ beautiful new “photographic memoir” Black | Box—and reproduced in theguardian.com in an announcement of McAdams’ lovely spring 2025 show at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery—is a perfect statement of one of her central aims as a photographer. “Everyone knew about the male gaze, but the female gaze interested me more. Women looked at women all the time. And not just a certain kind of woman, but all kinds of women. Every one of them. I photograph women because I love them and happen to be one.”
McAdams’ visual memoir combines prose fragments and a selection of photos from her long career shooting all over North America and beyond—after a challenging start in elementary school:
1961 Second grade. Brown bags. Nasty stains on the lunch table. I hated St. Joseph’s Catholic School. I hated the uniform with the pleated plaid skirt, the green ribbon tie, the shirt the color of a ‘flesh-color’ Crayola crayon. There was no gym at St. Joseph’s. No instruments to play. For recreation we got a parking lot. When I asked too many questions or talked too much the nuns made me write the Ten Commandments over and over again. Thou shalt not… It didn’t help that I was dyslexic. But no one knew at the time, especially me. One day discussing the Virgin Mary, I asked in class how Mary could be a virgin if she had a baby. The nun didn’t answer. My parents received a call that night. I was disruptive in class, they were told, and my parents obviously hadn’t been giving me “proper religious instruction.” All would be forgiven if one of them volunteered on Tuesday nights for Bingo.
She got kicked out of Catholic school and attended local public schools with native American names. She found salvation from her situation as a kind of domestic slave in her own home by “doing all the afterschool sports available. Because if you made the team it meant getting away on a bus after school. Which meant: home late. No making dinner that night. It wasn’t school spirit. It was hanging around with girls in gym suits, uniforms, shin guards, shorts, and letter jackets…I was a member of that tribe.”
Her father was a heavy drinker, and “I grew up in bars.” She’d take refuge in the “payphone in the back…. I’d sit inside on the bench and watch the scene through the glass. Brothers at the bar. Men smoking cigarettes. The air inside the payphone was cleaner because of the glass and the fan.” Her father died of a heart attack on a golf course in December of 1978.
McAdams took classes at Suffolk Community College, paying her way taking photos of teeth, until one patient, a young man heading to art school in San Francisco, convinced her to go with him and follow her dream. Supporting herself by working for an orthodontist in a nearby suburb, she’d race back to town to sit in on the boyfriend’s classes. She didn’t even own a camera then, but “each day on the streets,” she says in Black|Box, “I would take pictures in my head…. So by the time I finally bought a camera, I kind of knew what to do with it. I already knew how to shoot without actually owning the instrument.”
Geary Street, San Francisco, California, 1974. Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams.
Garry Winogrand, an influential street photographer guesting at the art school, told the class that this picture—spare at its center but alive at its edges—“is a really good photograph.”
As artists do, Dona held a range of different jobs to support herself; in the ‘80s and ‘90s she worked in a psychiatric facility in Coney Island, involving patients in art projects that came to include coloring, and drawing on, prints of her photos of them and of herself. In those years she was also the house photographer at P.S. 122, an experimental dance center in the city’s East Village that staged performances almost nightly. P.S. 122 provided her with a darkroom, remarkable independence, and a ready market for her work.
McAdams acquired Irish citizenship through her parents, traveled to Australia and Antarctica, and converted to Judaism to please her second husband’s parents, In the early ’80s she shot nuclear power plants on Long Island and elsewhere. “Now I’m interested in feminine power.”
Self portrait with Lesley and Yvonne, Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, Miami Dade County, 1981.
Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams.
When she was a working photographer in New York, her editors often requested pictures of celebrities; she managed to provide shots of friends like Angela Davis, Maurice Sendak, Karen Finley, even John Malkovich, but famous people never really interested her.
After her decades living in Manhattan, based in the East Village and shooting movement artists, queer performers, and other political figures through the worst of the AIDS crisis, she and Brad Kessler, who met in the city in 1995, decided to move to Vermont. Always attracted to horses, for 21 years she’s prowled the backstretch at upstate New York’s Saratoga Race Course, revealing the lives of the unsung workers who care for the horses when they’re out of the spotlight.
“I make art, but we have all these animals,” she told me on the phone. They can’t find anyone in their corner of Bennington County to milk for them; coming to New York City for the opening of her show was a challenge, and Kessler had to stay behind to look after the goats. “We break even with the goats and the cheese. Brad teaches at Antioch. I get Social Security.”
The show of photographs from Black | Box has been touring the northeast. A selection of McAdams’ other publications graced a table at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery this spring, among them her wonderful Caught in the Act: A Look at Contemporary Multimedia Performance (Aperture Foundation, 1996). I reviewed that book for the Village Voice when it came out, and a print from it, of a naked saxophone player (Dan Froot, who now runs the World Arts and Cultures dance department at UCLA), hangs on my bathroom wall.
Naomi Goldberg Haas performing “Nocturne” at Grant’s Tomb, June 2024.
Photograph by Meg Goldman, 2024
Naomi Goldberg Haas’s book could not be more different from McAdams’ fat coffee-table opus, which features large photographs printed on matte paper, each surrounded by ample white space. Goldberg’s book is a small-format, nearly 200-page paperback, its text peppered with small black-and-white photographs of Haas and some of her dancers and students.
Where McAdams’ book is quite idiosyncratic, a display of photographs spanning fifty years interspersed with and amplified by intimate prose pieces, Goldberg Haas’s Moving through Life: Essential Lessons of Dance combines autobiography with pedagogy, often in the same chapter and sometimes on the same page. It’s not a quick or easy read, but it’s a valuable one. Goldberg Haas recruited a college friend, Mikhaela Mahony, to help get her decades of essential dance revelations down on the page. At a book launch celebrating the finished volume in early May, Mahony told a large, multiracial crowd of dance enthusiasts, most of them current or former students (a category that includes me), that through working with Naomi “I became not only someone who could write a book, but I was becoming a dancer.”
Naomi Goldberg Haas (extreme right) teaching a class.
Photograph by Meg Goldman, 2018.
I met Naomi Goldberg in the mid-1980s through her mother, Bernice Hass Goldberg; we were both then working in arts in education. Daughter Naomi, born in 1963, was raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, by professional parents, the middle child of three sisters. She added a version of her mother’s maiden name, Haas, to her birth name in 2001, when their mother was ill in an intensive care unit, making this decision based on an old Hasidic Jewish tradition that holds that if you change the name of a sick person, the devils will be unable to find him. “We had to confuse the spirits by one of us sisters taking her maiden name spelled as she always wanted—Haas.” And so, midway through her professional career in New York, Naomi Goldberg Haas amended her name. The subterfuge seems to have worked; happily, her mother lasted another ten years after the change.
When Naomi was eight and still in elementary school, she survived a rigorous audition at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the feeder institution for New York City Ballet. This required her mother to drive her into the city several days a week after school and on weekends, until she was old enough to take the bus alone, and finally, after graduating from high school at 16, to move into an apartment near Lincoln Center. She reveled in the structure of the ballet classes, but began to realize that the traditional technical dance education on offer was not the best fit for her body; she began studying with other teachers around the city. Shaken by an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion, she quit SAB and applied to college; after two years at Barnard she joined Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. There she aspired to the role of Swan Queen in Swan Lake, but an ankle injury cut short her career in pointe shoes; after leaving the company and essaying a sojourn with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, she went back to Barnard, developing leadership skills, dipping into modern and downtown post-modern dance styles, and graduating in 1983.
Naomi Goldberg Haas in a solo from her KlezDance
for Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet, Luckman Theater, 1985.
Photograph by Craig Schwartz.
Soon after that we met in a contact improvisation workshop in downtown Manhattan, and our lives have entwined in interesting ways since. Both of us had a tropism toward moving west: she went first to Seattle and then to San Francisco, finally winding up in Los Angeles where she lived for over a decade; her trajectory overlapped with mine in the late 1980s, when I was writing for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and she became my teacher and guide to the mysterious ways of dance in the film capital. She introduced me to David Nillo, an original member of American Ballet Theater then in his late seventies, who was teaching a daily dance class for older adults in a huge gym at the Hollywood YMCA, near the corner of Hollywood and Vine. She founded the ensemble Dance Diner, and then a group called Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet, performing all over the sprawling city and teaching in schools and parks. Her special pleasure has been teaching dance in gymnasiums, in places like Y’s and JCCs, which allow room for people to move without the aesthetic associations of a proscenium stage.
In California she found the husband to whom she is still married, director and teacher Brian Kulick, and had a son at whose bris I was a guest. (So was playwright Tony Kushner, with whom she has often collaborated. The kid, Noah Kulick, is now in graduate school.) She began teaching in New York: first fitness lessons at NYU, and later early stirrings of what became Dances for a Variable Population, dance classes designed specifically for groups of senior movers. One of these was in a YMCA gym down the Bowery from my office at the Village Voice. I trained with Naomi until my knees gave out, more from climbing subway stairs to get there than from her carefully crafted technique.
Naomi Goldberg Haas (top center) and the cast of Revival 6
acknowledge applause after a performance at Grant’s Tomb, New York City, June 2022.
Photograph by Meg Goldman.
Even as Goldberg Haas honed her physical instrument, fate had other plans. With assiduous attention, she had managed to work through an early diagnosis of scoliosis in ballet class. Her maternal grandmother disapproved of Naomi’s pointe shoes, and before long the young dancer had drastically altered her way of working, focusing on finding internal balance. At 26 she was diagnosed with lupus; again she kept working, long after other performers would have given up. She earned an MFA at NYU and continued teaching and choreographing all over the city. At 57 she began to lose capacity in dramatic ways, and doctors identified the problem as Fahr’s Disease.
“It’s the change I did not see coming,” Goldberg Haas says in Moving Through Life. Fahr’s can “cause deterioration of motor function, seizures, poorly articulated speech, stiffness of the limbs, and involuntary, writhing movements, as well as disordered muscle tone and involuntary, rapid, jerky movements; it’s a rare neurological disorder characterized by abnormal deposits of calcium in the areas of the brain that control movement.” She’s still walking and dancing, and greets you with a cheery smile, but she can barely write her name.
As always Goldberg Haas knows how to adapt and modify. She’s hired more staff to run her remarkably successful nonprofit, Dances for a Variable Population (DVP), which provides free classes, workshops, and opportunities to perform for hundreds of older people in New York City, employing retired performers and choreographers, black and white, to teach them and stage dances with them. She has written a unique book which, in a freely associative manner, moves back and forth in time and space, collecting the various experiences that have shaped her as a dancer and as a teacher.
The book includes a curriculum for dance training with older adults, blending autobiography, memoir, pedagogy, and gratitude. In it she teaches and preaches; rhapsodizes about peak learning experiences in Cannes, France, and Saratoga Springs, New York; and recalls in endearing detail her passionate connection as a teenager with the man who is now the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick—a fellow Jerseyite whom she met on the bus coming home from college. I recently received a postcard announcing this year’s DVP culminating events, free performances and workshops at Grant’s Tomb in West Harlem on June 21, and at Queensbridge Park, in Long Island City, on June 28.
“There is always an alternative approach,” she told her audience at the book launch. She now practices yoga and pays special attention to balance and proprioception. Like Dona Ann McAdams, she understands this: “We must always pay attention to the space around us.”
Naomi Goldberg Haas, Moving through Life, Essential Lessons of Dance, with Mikhaela Mahony (University Press of Florida, 2025).
Women, the largest and yet most unrecognized population of the dance arts community, are spotlighted in renowned dance photographer Julie Lemberger’s Modern Women: 21st Century Dance, a coloring book, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.
Lemberger, who has been photographing dance for almost two decades, transformed her photographs into illustrations almost ready to color and then added psychedelic, floral and abstract backgrounds for the figures “to dance in.”
The 92 page volume features today’s leading dance innovators and interpreters, and celebrates their diverse genres and perspectives.
Modern Women: 21st Century Dance is a perfect gift for children-of-all-ages including grandparents and grandchildren, especially those who love women, dance and art.
Two options available:
Coloring book for $20
Shipping & handling is $5 each for U.S. addresses. Please contact for International shipping costs.
Elizabeth Zimmer writes, mostly about the arts; teaches writing wherever she is invited; and edits manuscripts of all sorts. She holds a B.A. from Bennington College, where she studied with Howard Nemerov, and an M.A. from Stony Brook University. She practices the Feldenkrais Method, and works as a standardized patient in hospitals and medical schools. Her ambition is to flourish as a stand-up comic. In addition to being on the Board of Directors, Elizabeth is both the magazine's Dance Editor and its Line Editor. Photo credit: Julie Lemberger.
Thank you ez for introducing me to these two remarkable women. Proof that life can be long and endlessly variable and surprising.
Loved ez’s reviews. Proof that a woman’s life can be, endlessly variable, unexpected and sometimes fun. Thank you ez
Love your pieces