Artist Donna Bassin
Dear Friend,

Donna Bassin knows that the arts can have healing powers. Her credentials make her better able to speak than most—she’s a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor at NYU’s postdoc program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She’s also an award-winning photographer, installation artist, and filmmaker whose work has been strongly influenced by her involvement with survivors of Ground Zero and veterans of war. In fact, Donna is a co-founder and board member of Frontline Arts, a program that began as a way for veterans to share their experiences and connect.
Photo by Donna Bassin
State of the Arts featured Donna’s series The Afterlife of Dolls during its exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum in 2004. She exhibits internationally, and is currently featured in ART150 Gallery’s The Empowering, A Social Justice Exhibition in Jersey City. Her work will be included in the Newark Museum of Art’s exhibition Revision and Respond, opening in June, featuring artists’ responses to the trauma of the past year. And, Donna has been selected as a 2021 recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography.

As Donna puts it in her bio, her work as an artist is to explore “the creative edge of collective loss, grief, mourning, and transformation.” As we here at State of the Arts continue to process this strange and sad year, we offer kudos to the artists who help us see the path forward.
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The State of the Arts team.
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The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and public engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce State of the Arts with Stockton University, New Jersey's distinctive public university, in cooperation with PCK Media.

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