Donna Bassin

Donna Bassin, born in Brooklyn NY, 1950 (Two By Two Client #4, 2021)
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Donna Bassin is a Brooklyn-born, New Jersey–based photographer, filmmaker, writer, and clinical psychologist whose work is rooted in decades of experience as a trauma therapist. Through long-term projects, she examines post-traumatic stress, racism, social injustice, moral injury, and environmental destruction, exploring how images can witness rupture while promoting ethical repair. Originally trained in art therapy at Pratt Institute, Bassin later earned a PhD in clinical psychology and pursued psychoanalytic training. Her early work as a handmade clay artist shaped her understanding that trauma leaves marks—on bodies, minds, and the materials we touch and shape. Her photographs reflect those marks: images are burned, torn, sutured, and sometimes reinforced with gold tape, inspired by the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi. These interventions do not conceal damage; they make loss visible, emphasizing that repair begins with acknowledgment.

Collaboration and community are central to her work. She has worked 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 her studio practice into collective acts of mourning, testimony, and healing. Bassin has conceived and directed two award-winning documentaries, “Leave No Soldier” and “The Mourning After.”

She has exhibited solo shows at museums, 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. Her photographs, essays, and interviews have appeared on New Jersey PBS’s State of the Arts, “Childhood,” Rhode Island PBS’s ART, Inc.’s “The Art of Repair,” and in publications such as The Pictorial List, Tricycle, Lenscratch, Analog Forever, and Overlapse’s “Stir the Pot.”

Bassin received a 2024 Puffin Foundation Artist Grant, a 2021 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, and was named a Critical Mass Top 50 Photographer and Finalist (2022–2024). Her work is held in public and private collections and has been exhibited internationally, including in Japan and Portugal.