Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) was a native of New York City, the daughter of Bernhard and Gertrude (Mass) Ulmann. She was first introduced to photography by Lewis Hine while training to become a teacher at the School of Ethical Culture, a socially liberal organization that championed individual worth regardless of ethnic background or economic condition. She then studied psychology at Columbia University, but became further enamored with photography after taking a class with Clarence White. In 1918 she decided to devote herself to the art professionally. Under the heavy influence of Clarence White, her early work is markedly pictorial, and includes a series of portraits of prominent intellectuals, artists and writers, among them William Butler Yeats, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Wood Krutch, Martha Graham, Anna Pavlova, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Gish. A member of the Pictorial Photographers of America, she exhibited in various New York galleries and published in Theatre Arts Monthly, Mentor, Scribner's Magazine, and Survey Graphic. In 1922 Johns Hopkins University published her book of Portraits of the Medical Faculty of the Johns Hopkins University, and in 1925 Rudge issued her second book, A Portrait Gallery of American Editors.

In 1925, Ulmann became interested in preserving rural traditions in the wake of modernity. She began documenting the people of the South, particularly the mountain peoples of Appalachia and the Gullahs of the Sea Islands, with a profound respect for her sitters and an ethnographer's eye for culture. From 1927, Ulmann was assisted on her rural travels by John Jacob Niles, a musician and folklorist who collected ballads while Ulmann photographed. During this time, Ulmann made the photographs for Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933), Julia Peterkin's novel that explored the folk life of African American Gullah residents on Peterkin's Lang Syne Plantation in South Carolina. Her work documenting Appalachian folk arts and crafts was published in Allen Eaton's 1937 book, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands.

In an interview with Dale Warren of Bookman Doris Ulmann referred to her particular interest in portraits. "The faces of men and women in the street are probably as interesting as literary faces, but my particular human angle leads me to men and women who write. I am not interested exclusively in literary faces, because I have been more deeply moved by some of my mountaineers than by any literary person. A face that has the marks of having lived intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power, constitutes for me an interesting face. For this reason the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life." ("Doris Ulmann: Photographer-in-waiting," Bookman, 72, 129-144.)

The Doris Ulmann photograph collection casts a wide net across a fields throughout the humanities: social and cultural history, women's studies, African-American studies, ethnography, and the history of photography. Ulmann's photographs represent important primary source material for historical and ethnographic studies of Appalachian and Gullah culture as well the subject of folk arts and craft traditions. Her photographs show detailed images of Appalachian craftspeople quilting, whittling, weaving, hooking rugs, spinning, and making baskets and ceramic ware. Ulmann often took a series of photographs of a craftsperson's hands while they worked in order to illustrate the technique involved in their craft. Recent activity in the field of Appalachian studies can be seen in Garry Barker's monograph, The Handicraft Revival in Southern Appalachia, 1930-1990 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). In the foreword to the book, Allen Eaton is credited with setting the stage and helping the craft revival happen: Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands is still used as the reference in the study of Appalachian crafts prior to 1935.

Doris Ulmann died in 1934 at the age of 52.