Dana Donaty is a South Florida–based artist whose work explores inhabiting a body shaped by illness through fiber, painting, sculpture, and installation.
Artist Statement
My work asks what it means to inhabit a body shaped by illness and how that fractures our sense of belonging in the world. Grounded in lived experience, my work connects the personal to broader questions of women’s health, care, and mortality.
Research is an important part of my practice, connecting my experience to a larger history of women’s health and medicine, as well as practices of care and healing. Central to the work are questions of whose pain is taken seriously, who holds authority over the body, and who gets to tell the story of women’s bodies.
Using vibrant color that insists on the excruciating pleasure of being alive and maximalist aesthetics, I create fiber works, paintings, and installations that draw on the body as a source. In my current fiber work, female bodies, lush landscapes, medicinal plants, and medical imagery come together in densely layered scenes, where the natural world pushes up against the medical one.
My work unfolds through punch needle, layering, stitching, and accumulation. The repetition of pushing yarn through cloth, one loop at a time, becomes a slow act of tending—not so different from caring for a body.
Grievance, grief, and gratitude form the emotional framework, allowing heartache, humor, rage, and joy to coexist within the same image.
Bio
Dana Donaty (b. 1966, Columbus, Ohio) is a Colombian-American artist based in South Florida. She holds a BFA from Moore College of Art & Design and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her practice spans fiber, painting, sculpture, and installation, connecting her experience of illness to broader questions of women’s health, medicine, and care.
Donaty has received grants from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and CERF+; a Residency Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center; and has been awarded residencies at ChaNorth, The Arts Warehouse, Bakehouse Art Complex, South Florida Ford, and Kriti Gallery.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Satell Family Foundation, Cricket Taplin, Palm Beach County Art in Public Places, Boynton Beach Art in Public Places, and West Palm Beach Art in Public Places.
Selected solo exhibitions include Moore College of Art & Design (Philadelphia, PA), Coral Springs Museum of Art (Coral Springs, FL), Cornell Museum of Art (Delray, FL), and South Florida Ford (Miami, FL), with a forthcoming solo exhibition at The Arts Warehouse (Delray, FL). Selected group exhibitions include The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn, NY), Penn + Brush (New York, NY), Hera Gallery (Wakefield, RI), The Camp Gallery (Miami, FL), the Mexican Consulate (Miami, FL), Coral Springs Museum of Art (Coral Springs, FL), Flatiron Gallery (New York, NY), Wavelength Space (Chattanooga, TN), the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County (Lake Worth Beach, FL), and Art and Culture Center Hollywood (Hollywood, FL).