Donna Bassin is a Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-based photographer, filmmaker, writer, and clinical psychologist. Informed by decades of work as a trauma therapist, her long-term projects examine post-traumatic stress, racism, social injustice, moral injury, and environmental destruction. Her practice considers how images can bear witness to rupture while creating possibilities for ethical repair. Donna studied art therapy at Pratt Institute before earning a PhD in clinical psychology and undertaking psychoanalytic training. Her early practice as a clay artist shaped her understanding of how trauma leaves traces on bodies, minds, and materials. Collaboration and community are central to her work. In partnership with military veterans, she transformed uniforms into handmade paper for By Our Own Hand, an installation presented at the Montclair Art Museum. The project positioned art-making as a collective process of mourning, testimony, and healing.

Donna conceived and directed the award-winning documentaries Leave No Soldier and The Mourning After. Her solo museum exhibitions include 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. She received 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 to 2024. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public and private collections.