Artist Statement

At the heart of my work are the everyday experiences of women’s lives—where triumphs, challenges, and absurdities unfurl like mythic journeys across shifting emotional landscapes and riotous colors bloom. Inspired by the spirit of Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay, Women: The Longest Revolution—published the year I was born—my work draws on the legacy of feminist transformation, weaving together ecofeminist visions, meditation’s quiet magic, and the ancient wisdom of shamanic practice.

In my larger-than-life, maximalist, color-saturated paintings, sculptural assemblages, text-based media, fiber works, and performances, material experimentation is essential to my approach. I conjure a world where the body is both sanctuary and battleground. Here, the forces that shape women’s lives—power, vulnerability, strength, and hope—are not just ideas, but living presences, whirling with the spirits of resilience, confronting the specters of inequality, aging, disability, health, and environmental crisis.

In a realm charged with raw emotion, humor and play thread through the work, holding the paradoxes of empowerment within patriarchal structures, celebrating the body’s tender strength, and honoring ancestry that is ever-present—pulsing beneath every surface. The work embraces all the big emotions of living in a female body—grief and joy, rage and wonder—as raw material for both creation and connection.

Bio

Dana Donaty is an artist born in Columbus, Ohio, to a Colombian mother and an American father, and raised in New Jersey. Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, sculptural assemblage, text-based media, fiber works, and performance, Donaty explores the everyday experiences of women’s lives, with the body as both sanctuary and battleground.

Donaty received her BFA in Drawing from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, PA in 1988 and an MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Art in New York City in 2024.

Her work has been exhibited at Moore College of Art and Design (PA) The Invisible Dog Art Center, Flatiron Gallery,The SVA Gramercy Gallery  (NY), Hera Gallery (RI), Wavelength Space (TN)The Coral Springs Museum of Art, The Camp Gallery, The Bakehouse Art Complex, Mattie Kelly Arts Center, The Art and Culture Center Hollywood, The Cornell Museum of Art, The Armory Art Center, The Palm Beach Cultural Council, The Arts Warehouse (FL)

Her work is in the permanent collection of The Coral Springs Museum of Art, private collections, and fourteen public art commissions. She has participated in Artist Residencies at Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami, FL, The Arts Warehouse, Delray, FL; Kriti Gallery, Varanasi, India; South Florida Ford, Miami, FL.