Biography
Donna Bassin, Ph.D., is an award-winning fine-art photographer, installation artist, psychoanalyst, author, professor, and filmmaker residing in Montclair, New Jersey. As an artist heavily influenced by her clinical work 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 that received a Golden Bell and Gradiva Award. Recently, she was selected as a recipient for the 2021 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography.
Donna’s work has been shown in exhibitions from New York City to Los Angeles and has been published in notable journals such as Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Lens Magazine, Grazia Magazine, and Aint-Bad. Her photographs have been commissioned for book covers and included in museum and private 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, located in Brooklyn, New York. Taking part in the Her Flag project (www.herflag.com), she created the stripe for New Jersey, which was displayed as a completed piece at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. on Flag Day of 2021.
Donna's current series, My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair and Precious Scars, explore the human desire for reconciliation in the wake of social fractures. The former won an international competition resulting in a solo exhibition at New York’s Soho Photo Gallery and has been shown on a billboard in Brooklyn, the Newark Museum, and in several varying group shows. Precious Scars is currently on display at the Jamestown Arts Center in Rhode Island as part of the exhibition, RAW: Reassessment and Wonder.
By Our Own Hand, an installation designed by Donna in collaboration with Frontline Arts, is currently on view at the Montclair Art Museum until the summer of 2022. The installation was inspired by Tibetan prayer flags and consists of handmade paper created from military uniforms to serve as a reflective space to consider the price of war for our service personnel.