Biography
Artwork © Mimi Pantuhova
As a fine art photographer and trauma psychologist, Donna Bassin, Ph.D. engages with painful aspects of contemporary life, such as racism, social injustice, and, most recently, the destruction of our environment.
She is known for her documentaries, Leave No Soldier and The Mourning After, and her series The Afterlife of Dolls – a solo exhibition at Montclair Art Museum featured on PBS' State of the Arts and received a Golden Bell and Gradiva Award. She was selected as a recipient of the 2021 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography and most recently, as one of the Top 50 photographers in Critical Mass 2022 and a Finalist in Klompching Gallery’s FRESH 2022 Annual Photography Exhibition.
Her work has been showcased in many juried national exhibitions, published in periodicals such as Tricycle, Fotonostrum, Grazia, and Lens Magazine, and featured on book covers and in private collections. Her installations have appeared at the Jamestown Arts Center, Smack Mellon, Mills Reservation, Jersey City, and the Montclair Art Museum.
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. The former was featured in the Newark Museum for the 2021 New Jersey Arts Annual: ReVision and Respond as well as solo exhibitions at the Soho Photo Gallery in New York City and, currently, at the Passaic County Arts Center in Hawthorne, New Jersey. Precious Scars was shown at the Jamestown Arts Center in Jamestown, Rhode Island as part of the exhibition RAW: Reassessment and Wonder.
Environmental Melancholia, her newest series, focuses on creating visual metaphors using landscapes to bring attention to the Earth’s fragility and to engage with the public’s difficulty accepting the losses of our current ecological threats.