John White, active 1577–1593, was an English artist, mapmaker, explorer, and colonial governor. His early life and artistic training are uncertain, although he may have belonged to London’s Painter-Stainers’ Company.

White may have accompanied Martin Frobisher’s 1577 Arctic voyage and served as artist and mapmaker on the 1585 expedition to Roanoke Island. Working with Thomas Harriot, he made watercolours recording Indigenous people, settlements, ceremonies, foodways, plants, and animals. Theodor de Bry later adapted many of these images as engravings.

White became governor of the Roanoke Colony in 1587. Delayed in England while seeking supplies, he returned in 1590 to find the settlement abandoned. He was last documented in 1593; the principal collection of his surviving watercolours is in the British Museum, London.