Joanne Leonard (born 1940) is an American photographer and artist whose work has been central to the development of feminist photography and the use of photographic collage and manipulation as vehicles for personal and political expression. Trained at the University of California, Berkeley, and active primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and later in Michigan, where she joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, Leonard emerged as a significant figure in the women's art movement of the 1970s.

Leonard's photographs are distinguished by their integration of personal biography with broader social and political concerns. Her series Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal, produced in the early 1970s, is among her most celebrated bodies of work, combining photographic imagery with text and handwritten annotation to explore themes of marriage, domesticity, and the constraints placed upon women's lives and creative aspirations. The work belongs to a broader moment in which feminist artists were turning to autobiography and the everyday as sources of political and aesthetic meaning.

Throughout her career, Leonard has explored the photograph not as a transparent record of the world but as a mutable, interpretable artifact, open to manipulation, layering, and recontextualization. Her use of photocollage, multiple exposures, and handwriting on photographic surfaces reflects an ongoing interest in the boundaries between photography, drawing, and text.

As both a practicing artist and a long-serving educator, Joanne Leonard has contributed substantially to the institutional and intellectual life of American photography and feminist art. Her work is held in major museum collections, and her influence on younger generations of photographers and artists working with personal narrative has been widely acknowledged.