Artist Statement
My work is a personal, playful, and incisive exploration of the layered complexity of the female experience—its triumphs, challenges, and absurdities. Each piece unfurls like a wildly mythic journey across shifting emotional landscapes, rendered in bold, riotous South Florida colors.
Inspired by Juliet Mitchell’s influential 1966 essay, Women: The Longest Revolution—published the year I was born—I draw upon a legacy of feminist transformation, weaving ecofeminist visions, meditation’s quiet magic, and shamanic practice.
Through large-scale paintings, sculptural installations, text, fiber, and performance, I transform lived experience into poetic visual statements—opening a window onto the emotional and physical realities of the female body as both sanctuary and battleground. Working across these varied forms deepens my inquiry into how material, process, and meaning are bound together in the worlds I create. Each piece becomes both a personal excavation and a reflection on collective histories, engaging with memory, aging, disability, health, environmental crisis, and the ever-evolving roles of women
In these realms charged with raw emotion, humor is as vital as grief and rage, holding the paradoxes of empowerment within patriarchal structures. I celebrate the body’s tender strength, honor ancestry pulsing beneath every surface, and embrace all the big emotions of living in a female body—transforming them into sources of creation and connection.
Bio
Dana Donaty (b. 1966, Columbus, Ohio) is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist who calls South Florida home after twelve years of living and working in London. Her work explores the layered complexities of the female experience—rooted in the legacy of feminist transformation and unfolding like mythic journeys of triumph, challenge, and absurdity—set against shifting emotional landscapes and rendered in bold, riotous Florida colors. Her diverse practice spans painting, sculptural assemblage, text-based media, fiber works, and performance. Donaty earned her BFA in Drawing from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, PA, in 1988 and her MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2024.
Raised in Somerset County, New Jersey, Donaty’s creative path began early—shaped by her mother’s artistic lineage and art lessons, and by the discipline of her father’s work as a physician, within an immersive education that included assisting in clinical settings, observing patient care, and joining hospital rounds—experiences that sparked a lifelong fascination with the human body, caregiving, and the complex systems of healthcare. Equally formative were memories of her parents redecorating and collecting souvenirs and keepsakes—moments that cultivated her sensitivity to how spaces and cherished objects shape mood and perception
This attunement to environment led to a thirty-year career in decorative finishes, developed alongside her art practice, where she explored materials ranging from cement and plaster to gilding and murals—a tactile investigation that continues to inform her art practice today, shaping an instinctive approach to materials for both their physical and conceptual impact.
This lifelong interplay of art, science, and spatial sensitivity became the generative force behind her work. She came to understand the body as more than anatomy—viewing it as a living archive shaped by emotion, perception, and what she calls “the biology of belief.” In her Florida home studio, surrounded by an ever-changing array of experimental materials, she draws on these sources to create visceral works.
Selected Solo Projects include Mile Marker 58: A Softer Way Through, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA (2025); Pareidolia, Mattie Kelly Arts Center, Destin, FL (2024); Psychedelic Rodeo, Florida Atlantic University Library, Jupiter, FL (2022); Pareidolia: A Survey of Works, Coral Springs City Hall, Coral Springs, FL (2019); Profoundly Playful: A Survey of Works, Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs, FL (2018); Profoundly Play: A Survey of Works, Cornell Museum of Art, Delray Beach, FL (2018); Reality Check, South Florida Ford – Fordistas Gallery, Miami, FL (2016); and A Piece of Me, Paul Fisher Gallery, Palm Beach, FL (2016).
Selected Group Exhibitions include The Body Show, Arts Warehouse, Delray Beach, FL; Pink Silo, Wavelength Space, Chattanooga, TN; Ancestral Lines, Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs, FL; Rewriting Her Story, Hera Gallery, Wakefield, RI (2025); Evidence of Things Unseen, The Invisible Dog, Brooklyn, NY; By the Book: A Celebration of Art and Text, Westbury Arts, Westbury, NY; The American Woman: Feminist Futures, Hera Gallery, Wakefield, RI; Conceptually Green, Arts Warehouse, Delray Beach, FL (2024); Women Pulling at the Threads of Social Discourse, The Camp Gallery, Miami, FL; 31st Emerald Coast National Juried Exhibit, Mattie Kelly Art Center, Northwest State College, Niceville, FL; New Way of Doing Things, Flatiron Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Silent Narrator / Curious Spectator, The Frank Art Gallery, Pembroke Pines, FL; Florida Biennial, Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; and Contemporary Art of the Latin Diaspora, Palm Beach Cultural Council, Lake Worth, FL (2022).
Public and Private Collections include The Coral Springs Museum of Art; ArtLife, City of West Palm Beach; Palm Beach County Art in Public Places; Boynton Beach Art in Public Places; and Palm Beach International Art Gallery. She has been awarded residencies at the Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami, FL; The Arts Warehouse, Delray, FL; Kriti Gallery, Varanasi, India; and South Florida Ford, Miami, FL.