Since 1974, Yolanda Andrade has dedicated herself to photography, after becoming involved in the Photographic Club of Mexico. Between 1976 and 1977, Andrade studied photography at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, under the guidance of Nathan Lyons.

Upon her return to Mexico and under the influence of the New York photography scene, Andrade documents daily life and popular culture on the streets of Mexico City. And, from this, a body of work begins to take shape that is capable of capturing the essence of the cultural environment in the Mexican capital, shedding light on the social dynamics of the present time and highlighting elements, often marginalized, of the culture that will go on to influence the generality of the Latin American context.

Her work not only documents the collective spirit on the streets of Mexico City, but speaks of the desires, intimacies and frustrations of groups and individuals from a poetic and expressive perspective. After more than twenty-five years of generating black and white images with analog cameras, Yolanda Andrade began to explore color in digital photography in the early 2000s.

Since 1992, Andrade has also worked as a teacher at the Nacho López School of Photography, at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City and at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Among other awards, she has received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Artistic Creation in 2004, as well as grants from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes of Mexico to finance her publications and projects in 1993, 1997, 2000 and 2003. She has participated in 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 for Photography (ICP) in New York. Her work was also included in the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 – 1985, organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017) and presented at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, both in 2018.

Her work is part of important public and private collections, including: Museo del Barrio (New York, United States), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, United States), Getty Museum (Los Angeles, United States), International Center for Photography (ICP – New York, United States), Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City, Mexico), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, United States), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, United States), Kyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (Hokuto, Japan), Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou, China), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Santa Barbara, United States).