Dorothy Catherine Draper (6 August 1807–10 December 1901) was an artist, educator and chemist notable for being the subject of the earliest existent daguerreotype portrait made in the United States.

[6] She had two sisters, Elizabeth Johnson and Sarah Ripley, and a brother, the scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian, and photographer John William Draper.

Following her father's death in Kent in February 1829, Dorothy moved with her mother and siblings to the US state of Virginia, where her brother John hoped to acquire a teaching position at a local Methodist college.

[2] John William Draper made several important innovations in photochemistry, which improved on Louis Daguerre's process and helped establish portrait photography as a viable practice.

[9][10][11] Draper took a series of pictures, with a 65-second exposure in sunlight, in his Washington Square studio at New York University in 1839 or 1840, within the first year of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre's announcement in Paris of his invention of the daguerreotype process.