Bio:
Donna Gordon is an American writer and visual artist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working across photography, printmaking, and literature, her practice explores portraiture, memory, identity, and the emotional complexities of the human experience.
She received the 2025 Denis Roussel Award for a series of photogravures first printed in Rfotofolio. Lensculture posted a feature about the award in May, 2026. Her work was most recently exhibited at the Griffin Museum, ImageNation Paris, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans and Remarque Print in Albuquerque, NM.
Alongside her visual practice, Gordon is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me (2022), received a starred Kirkus review and was named among the 100 Best Indie Novels of 2023. She was a 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice Award and received multiple Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. Her work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries, including the Danforth Art Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum, ArtsWorcester, and Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, where she exhibited, “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable,” a project portraying former prisoners of conscience.
Statement:
“Vanessa, Embrace” is from an ongoing series, “In the Garden.” The series explores contemporary women, each portrait with a garden or landscape, meant as both a knock and a nod to the idea of Eve as portrayed in the Garden of Eden. I’ve photographed more than sixty female-identifying individuals in the US and abroad. I hope to turn this series into a book and am looking for a publisher.
Donna Gordon
Scholar, Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center
2024 MacDowell Fellow
Author, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, Regal House
Instagram: donnagordon8994
