In 1968 Evans received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Kansas. The Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship are among the many grants and fellowships she has received during her artistic career. Her works appear in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Evans has written several books about the changing landscapes of North American prairies since she began documenting these changes in 1989. Although Evans moved to Chicago in 1994, she remains committed to working on the ecology, abandonment and recovery of the prairie in her native Kansas. As a result of her photographic exploration of the prairie in Kansas, she has discovered that there are patterns and relationships existing within the natural and human prairie communities.