Donna Ferrato

Donna Ferrato is a photojournalist and activist known for her coverage of domestic violence and her documentation of the New York City neighborhood of Tribeca.

Ferrato has worked for Life, Time, People, The New York Times, and Mother Jones. Her photographs have won various awards and have appeared in solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. She has been a member of the Executive Board of Directors for the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and was president and founder of the non-profit Domestic Abuse Awareness (501-c3).

Ferrato was born on 5 June 1949 in Waltham, Massachusetts and grew up in Lorain, Ohio. Her father, Peter John Ferrato, was a vascular chest surgeon who met his wife, Ann O'Mally, while interning at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The couple had three children: Donna Ferrato, Peter (Pizzo) Ferrato, and Louis T. Ferrato. Donna Ferrato graduated from the Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1968. She was recognized in 1992 as one of the Laurel School's Distinguished Alumna. Ferrato went on to attend Garland Junior College in Boston, where she met and married Harvard graduate Mark Webb.

In 1971, Ferrato and Webb moved to San Francisco, where Ferrato worked as a legal secretary. In 1975, Ferrato and Webb divorced, and Ferrato began photographing and hitchhiking across the United States. In San Francisco, she worked odd jobs, including a stint as the camera girl at the Hilton Hotel. She studied photography at The Art Institute of California - San Francisco, where she took courses under sociologist Howard S. Becker.

In 1977, Ferrato met artist Michael Bowen and travelled with him and his family on the QE2 to join an art colony in Portugal. Ferrato parted ways with Bowen and began hitchhiking around Belgium and France, where she photographed baguette culture in Paris. Also in Paris, she worked at Claude Nori's photography gallery Contrejour.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023