Joseph Christopher Yates (November 9, 1768 – March 19, 1837) was an American lawyer, politician, statesman, and founding trustee of Union College.

Yates is the only Governor of New York to have been born in Schenectady County, which was settled in the early Dutch colonial period.

As Governor, Yates sat for a portrait by John Vanderlyn, an American painter famed for his portrayals of such eminent political figures as George Washington, Aaron Burr, James Monroe, George Clinton, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor.

In the course of his life he married three times: the first was said to be for love: Ann, widow of James Ellice ; the second was for money, Maria, daughter of John Kane and his wife; and the last was for clout, as he required her connections to further his ambitious political career, Elizabeth De Lancey, a daughter of John De Lancey and his wife, of Westchester County, New York.

In 1889, his youngest daughter, Jane (Yates) Neil, arranged to reinter the remains of her father Joseph and those of several other Yates family members to her husband's Neil family mausoleum in the churchyard of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Bronx County, New York.