PICTORIAL FOUNDATION | DONNA BASSIN

DONNA BASSIN

Montclair NJ UNITED STATES

I am a Brooklyn-born, New Jersey–based photographer, filmmaker, writer, and clinical psychologist whose work is informed by decades of experience as a trauma therapist. Through long-term projects, I examine post-traumatic stress, racism, social injustice, moral injury, and environmental destruction, exploring how images can bear witness to rupture while also opening possibilities for ethical repair.

Originally trained in art therapy at Pratt Institute, I later earned a PhD in clinical psychology and pursued psychoanalytic training. My early work as a handmade clay artist shaped my understanding that trauma leaves traces — on bodies, minds, and the materials we touch and shape. This philosophy continues to inform my photographic practice.

Collaboration and community are central to my practice. I have worked closely with military veterans to transform their uniforms into handmade paper, culminating in the installation By Our Own Hand at the Montclair Art Museum. These projects extend my studio practice into collective acts of mourning, testimony, and healing.

I have also conceived and directed two award-winning documentaries, Leave No Soldier and The Mourning After. My work has been presented in solo museum exhibitions including The Afterlife of Dolls at the Montclair Art Museum, Portraits of the Precarious Earth at the Newport Art Museum, and Interwoven: Rupture and Repair at the Morris Museum. I was awarded a 2024 Puffin Foundation Artist Grant and a 2021 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and was named a Critical Mass Top 50 Photographer and Finalist from 2022–2024. My work is held in both public and private collections and has been exhibited internationally, including in Japan and Portugal.

I make photo-based work that doesn’t end with the camera. I’m most drawn to treating the photograph as an object: tearing, stitching, and rebuilding it so that it carries its own history. The work holds rupture and repair at the same time, without trying to resolve either.

My inspiration comes from questions I live with: how we carry loss, how we avoid it, and what it means to truly face it. My work as a psychoanalyst shapes this, as do the environments I photograph.

ARTWORKS

My Own Witness. Rupture and Repair. Pandy. 24 ((2020)

DONNA BASSIN

archival pigment print, gold embroidery thread, gold rice paper, Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300, Epson Ultrachrome
K3 inks
28H x 22W in (71 x 56 cm)
edition 1/3
US $1500 (framed)

“My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair is a photographic series of black-and-white portrait collaborations that center women’s presence and the bonds they build to survive what is difficult to bear. In the years following the 2016 election — and deepening through the isolations of the pandemic — I invited women and gender-marginalized sitters who, through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, or disability, felt pushed to the edges of public life to co-create images that refuse erasure. I asked each sitter to “turn themselves inside out,” using gaze, gesture, clothing, and chosen objects to communicate emotional truth and become their own witnesses. A shared black velvet backdrop and chiaroscuro lighting place each portrait in the same visual field, linking distinct lives into a collective.

They are about the shared labor of witness and repair — women’s capacity to remain visible, to hold one another in complexity, and to keep going.”

My Own Witness. Rupture and Repair. Catherine. 7 (2020)

DONNA BASSIN

archival pigment print, gold embroidery thread, gold rice paper, Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300, Epson Ultrachrome
K3 inks
28H x 22W in (71 x 56 cm)
edition 1/3
US $1500 (framed)

“My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair is a photographic series of black-and-white portrait collaborations that center women’s presence and the bonds they build to survive what is difficult to bear. In the years following the 2016 election — and deepening through the isolations of the pandemic — I invited women and gender-marginalized sitters who, through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, or disability, felt pushed to the edges of public life to co-create images that refuse erasure. I asked each sitter to “turn themselves inside out,” using gaze, gesture, clothing, and chosen objects to communicate emotional truth and become their own witnesses. A shared black velvet backdrop and chiaroscuro lighting place each portrait in the same visual field, linking distinct lives into a collective.

They are about the shared labor of witness and repair — women’s capacity to remain visible, to hold one another in complexity, and to keep going.”

My Own Witness. Rupture and Repair. Aya. 1 (2020)

DONNA BASSIN

archival pigment print, gold embroidery thread, gold rice paper, Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300, Epson Ultrachrome
K3 inks
28H x 22W in (71 x 56 cm)
edition 1/3
US $1500 (framed)

“My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair is a photographic series of black-and-white portrait collaborations that center women’s presence and the bonds they build to survive what is difficult to bear. In the years following the 2016 election — and deepening through the isolations of the pandemic — I invited women and gender-marginalized sitters who, through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, or disability, felt pushed to the edges of public life to co-create images that refuse erasure. I asked each sitter to “turn themselves inside out,” using gaze, gesture, clothing, and chosen objects to communicate emotional truth and become their own witnesses. A shared black velvet backdrop and chiaroscuro lighting place each portrait in the same visual field, linking distinct lives into a collective.

They are about the shared labor of witness and repair — women’s capacity to remain visible, to hold one another in complexity, and to keep going.”

My Own Witness. Rupture and Repair. Maryam. 1 (2020)

DONNA BASSIN

archival pigment print, gold embroidery thread, gold rice paper, Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300, Epson Ultrachrome
K3 inks
22H x 16W in (55.9 x 40.6 cm)
edition 1/8
US $1000 (framed)

“My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair is a photographic series of black-and-white portrait collaborations that center women’s presence and the bonds they build to survive what is difficult to bear. In the years following the 2016 election — and deepening through the isolations of the pandemic — I invited women and gender-marginalized sitters who, through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, or disability, felt pushed to the edges of public life to co-create images that refuse erasure. I asked each sitter to “turn themselves inside out,” using gaze, gesture, clothing, and chosen objects to communicate emotional truth and become their own witnesses. A shared black velvet backdrop and chiaroscuro lighting place each portrait in the same visual field, linking distinct lives into a collective.

They are about the shared labor of witness and repair — women’s capacity to remain visible, to hold one another in complexity, and to keep going.”

My Own Witness. Rupture and Repair. Sufiyyah. 13. (2020)

DONNA BASSIN

archival pigment print, gold embroidery thread, gold rice paper, Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300, Epson Ultrachrome
K3 inks
22H x 16W in (55.9 x 40.6 cm)
edition 1/8
US $1000 (framed)

“My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair is a photographic series of black-and-white portrait collaborations that center women’s presence and the bonds they build to survive what is difficult to bear. In the years following the 2016 election — and deepening through the isolations of the pandemic — I invited women and gender-marginalized sitters who, through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, or disability, felt pushed to the edges of public life to co-create images that refuse erasure. I asked each sitter to “turn themselves inside out,” using gaze, gesture, clothing, and chosen objects to communicate emotional truth and become their own witnesses. A shared black velvet backdrop and chiaroscuro lighting place each portrait in the same visual field, linking distinct lives into a collective.

They are about the shared labor of witness and repair — women’s capacity to remain visible, to hold one another in complexity, and to keep going.”

My Own Witness Rupture and Repair.Dulce.13 (2020)

DONNA BASSIN

22H x 16W in (55.9 x 40.6cm)
digital photograph, edition 1/8
$1100

“My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair is a photographic series of black-and-white portrait collaborations that center women’s presence and the bonds they build to survive what is difficult to bear. In the years following the 2016 election — and deepening through the isolations of the pandemic — I invited women and gender-marginalized sitters who, through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, or disability, felt pushed to the edges of public life to co-create images that refuse erasure. I asked each sitter to “turn themselves inside out,” using gaze, gesture, clothing, and chosen objects to communicate emotional truth and become their own witnesses. A shared black velvet backdrop and chiaroscuro lighting place each portrait in the same visual field, linking distinct lives into a collective.

They are about the shared labor of witness and repair — women’s capacity to remain visible, to hold one another in complexity, and to keep going.”

My Own Witness Rupture and Repair. Shontel. 11. (2020)

DONNA BASSIN

22H x 16W in (55.9 x 40.6cm)
digital photograph, edition 2/8
$1100

“My Own Witness: Rupture and Repair is a photographic series of black-and-white portrait collaborations that center women’s presence and the bonds they build to survive what is difficult to bear. In the years following the 2016 election — and deepening through the isolations of the pandemic — I invited women and gender-marginalized sitters who, through race, sexuality, gender identity, age, ethnicity, or disability, felt pushed to the edges of public life to co-create images that refuse erasure. I asked each sitter to “turn themselves inside out,” using gaze, gesture, clothing, and chosen objects to communicate emotional truth and become their own witnesses. A shared black velvet backdrop and chiaroscuro lighting place each portrait in the same visual field, linking distinct lives into a collective.

They are about the shared labor of witness and repair — women’s capacity to remain visible, to hold one another in complexity, and to keep going.”

FEATURES & EXHIBITIONS

Rupture Repair Remnant

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DONNA BASSIN

Montclair NJ UNITED STATES

ARTWORKS

FEATURES & EXHIBITIONS