Donna Ferrato

Donna Ferrato has been photographing professionally for more than twenty years.   Her particular talent lies in exploring worlds rarely seen by the camera with the motto that "nothing is un-photographable". Ferrato has an expertise on the subject of love and family life. While working on a story about a couple in love, the photojournalist saw a man hit his wife. Until then she thought the greatest threat of danger to women came from strangers. Suddenly, her eyes were opened to the darker side of family life. That experience changed her life as a photographer, starting her on what has evolved as a life-long mission to explore and understand the abuse of women and children by the ones they love.

For ten years, she documented domestic abuse by spending time in battered women's shelters, living with couples in their homes, and riding with the police for weeks at a time. In 1991, Aperture published her documentation in a book titled,"Living with the Enemy", a photo-journey that engages the reader in the dark and often neglected realities of love and family life.

Shortly afterwards, a New York Women's shelter approached her to explore the possibility of mounting a benefit exhibition of her photographs from the book. The exhibition was an immense success, not only in raising badly needed funds for the shelter, but also in educating the public.

Before long, Donna was inundated with similar benefit exhibition requests from shelters around the country. To cope with the demand and to be true to her commitment to expose the horror of abuse and assault within homes, the domestic violence activist formed the non-profit organization Domestic Abuse Awareness, Inc. (DAA) with a mission to expose and help eradicate violence against women and children through awareness, education, and action. The exhibitions have since traveled to over 95 venues, nationally and internationally. They have enabled community groups to raise over $500,000 for battered women's shelters.

Today, Ferrato lectures on domestic violence at universities, hospitals, and shelters. Ferrato has worked worldwide on assignments from Bruce Springsteen to the Gulf War. Her photographs have been published extensively, in publications such as Life, Fortune, The New York Times Magazine, Stern in Germany, DAS and DU magazines in Switzerland. Her domestic violence documentation has won numerous awards, including the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and the Kodak Crystal Eagle for Courage in Journalism.

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