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 the Montclair Art Museum that was featured on PBS' State of the Arts and received both a Golden Bell and Gradiva Award. She was recently selected as a recipient for a 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.
She has recently been invited to represent New Jersey's women artists in a public art project, Her Flag (www.herflag.com). She has additionally 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.
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.