Adriano Fagundes was born in Starkville, Mississippi (USA), and grew up in Brasília, where he developed the attentive gaze that would later define his artistic practice. At 18, he moved to New York City to study photography at the School of Visual Arts. During this period, he worked as a freelance assistant to several photographers, refining his technical mastery of light, composition, and visual storytelling.
From 1995 to 1998, he served as first assistant to legendary Vogue photographer Arthur Elgort, who became both mentor and friend. In 1998, he launched his professional career in New York, working with a wide range of clients while traveling extensively on assignments. Simultaneously, he cultivated his musical side as a DJ and percussionist in his project Call to Drum (2002–2010) at Bembe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.
In 2010, Fagundes relocated to Rio de Janeiro, where he continued to work on editorials, catalogues, and advertising campaigns while pursuing a decade-long personal project documenting life along the Amazon River — a 6,800 km journey from its source in the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. The work culminated in his first book, From the Andes to the Atlantic: A Journey down the Amazon River (2014), published in Portuguese and English.
His following books include Olympic Legacy (2016), chronicling the vast operation that fed 25,000 athletes during the Rio 2016 Olympics, and Gastronomic Landscapes: São Paulo (2019), portraying 35 sustainable producers throughout the state — a finalist for Brazil’s Jabuti Prize in 2020.
In 2021, he released Vasto Mundo, a special edition that brings together the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Fagundes’ travel photography from 1990 to 2021 — a timeless dialogue between word and image.
In 2019, he was honored with the Lusofonia Award in Arts in Lisbon, where he has lived since 2020 with his wife, Patrícia. He continues to develop photographic and musical projects between Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, and beyond.