Biography
Donna Bassin, Ph.D., is an award-winning fine art photographer, installation artist, author, professor, and filmmaker. As an artist heavily influenced by her work as a clinical psychologist and her experiences working with war veterans and at Ground Zero, Donna uses art to explore the creative edge of collective loss, grief, mourning, and transformation. She is known for her documentaries, Leave No Soldier and The Mourning After, and her photo series The Afterlife of Dolls – a solo exhibition at Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, New Jersey) that was featured on PBS' State of the Arts and received both a Golden Bell and Gradiva Award. She was selected as a recipient for the 2021 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography.
Her work has been juried and shown in numerous group exhibitions stretching from New York City to Los Angeles. Her photographs have also been commissioned for book covers and are in private and museum collections.
Donna has contributed portraits from her series, My Own Witness, to Smack Mellon Gallery for their exhibition of Bound Up Together: On the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment, and to SaveArtSpace and Art4Equality for a billboard installation, both located in Brooklyn, New York. Taking part in the Her Flag project (www.herflag.com), she created the stripe for New Jersey, which will be displayed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. on Flag Day of 2021.
Donna's current projects, My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair and Precious Scars, explore the human desire for reconciliation in the wake of social fractures. My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair will be featured in the Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey) for the 2021 New Jersey Arts Annual: ReVision and Respond and as an upcoming solo exhibition for July 2021 at the Soho Photo Gallery in New York City.