Dayanita Singh (born 1961) is an Indian photographer, lives and works in New Delhi and now also is partly based in Goa, who is known for her portraits of India's urban middle and upper class families. Most of her work is in black-and-white.
From 1980 to 1986 she studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. In 1987 and 1988, she studied Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography, New York.
Singh has shifted to Goa in recent years, and says that living in a village there has shaped her art in unexpected ways. She said in a post-1999 interview that she has surprised those familiar with her work by coming out with photographs that simply don't have people in them.

In Goa, Singh has also released black-and-white photographs from Mumbai and Goa. She has commented on this work: "It's of spaces without obvious people, as though people by unseened generations. There are no people in the photographs, yet they are full of mental energy."
Until Singh visited Goa in 1999, she says she could "never imaging making images without people". But the change has been drastic. "Now I photograph clouds!," she said in an interview.

Singh, earlier based in Delhi, has made a name for herself in an otherwise male-dominanted field, by attracting attention for her feature and news-based photographs in capitals across the globe.

A retrospective of the artist's work is planned at the Hamburger Bahnhoff in the German capital of Berlin in the past, along with a book from reputed publisher Scalo, focussing on the same work. "My publisher and guide made the decision of the retrospective after seeing my Goa images. That's the kind of difference Goa made to my work," she said in an interview.

In particular, Singh has been infatuated by the old world charms of a quaint village called Saligao, which lies just outside the beach-belt. Except in recent years when villagers have protested the large quantities of water being transported from here to the beach-belt, and the dumping of holidayers garbage nearby, the village has been mainly aloof from the hustle and bustle of the over-commercialised beach belt.