Mary Edith Durham, FRAI (8 December 1863 – 15 November 1944) was a British artist, anthropologist and writer who is best known for her anthropological accounts of life in Albania in the early 20th century.

She exhibited widely and contributed a number of detailed drawings to the amphibia and reptiles volume of the Cambridge Natural History (published 1899).

According to American scholars Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Meštrović, her eccentric personality and her incessant lobbying activity made her despised by the British Foreign Office.

[4] Becoming increasingly anti-Serb following the First World War,[4] she denounced what she termed "Serb vermin" for having "not created a Jugoslavia but have carried out their original aim of making Great Serbia.... Far from being liberated the bulk of people live under a far harsher rule than before".

Author Rebecca West included Durham in her description of the sort of traveller who came back "with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer" (Durham sued West over this)[6] and then went on to say: "The Bulgarians, as preferred by some, and the Albanians, as championed by others, strongly resembled Sir Joshua Reynolds's picture of the Infant Samuel".

When she died in 1944, she received high praise for her work from the exiled King Zog, who wrote: "She gave us her heart and she won the ear of our mountaineers".

Her papers are held by the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, her diaries are in the Bankfield Museum, Halifax along with her collections of Balkan costume and jewellery given in 1935.