Donna DeCesare
Photo by Eli Reed
Associate Professor
Contact Information:
CMA A5.150E
512-471-1980
ddecesare@mail.utexas.edu
Latest update: Donna DeCesare is invited to a panel discussion “Witness: Photographers, Journalists, and Social Workers Respond to Tragedy” on December 3, 2008.
An award-winning photojournalist with a focus on Latin America, Donna DeCesare is widely known for her groundbreaking reportage on the spread of Los Angeles gangs in Central America. A selection of this work is on exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center from April 17, 2008 to August 3 2008.
View an interview at the HRC with Professor DeCesare
See interview with Professor DeCesare on New York's Grit TV
Download profile of Professor DeCesare in the July 2008 issue of Austin Woman
Her recognitions for this work include: an Alfred Eistendstadt magazine photography award (2000), a Canon photo essay award in Pictures of the Year (2000), and an award for reporting on criminal justice from the National Center on Crime and Delinquency.
Many news and arts publications have featured DeCesare’s photographs including: The New York Times Magazine, Life, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, DoubleTake, and Aperture. Since 1995, she also has worked as a video journalist and producer on numerous documentaries for The Learning Channel. “Killer Virus,” her first collaboration with TLC won an Emmy Award in 1996.
DeCesare's internationally competitive grants and fellowships include the Dorothea Lange Prize, an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, the Mother Jones International Photo Fund grant,a George Soros Independent Project Fellowship and most recently a Fulbright Fellowship in Colombia.
Her 2006 exhibition, “Sharing Secrets: Children’s Portraits Exposing Stigma” has traveled to New York, Washington DC, Korea, Poland and China. It will be on view at the Columbia University School of Social Work until December 2008. These photographs and testimonies from children in Guatemala and Colombia who are former child soldiers, survivors of sexual abuse, or who live with the stigma of HIV aided UNICEF in developing protocols for photographing children at risk.
Hear her speak about her work with the Director of Photography for UNICEF.
DeCesare’s most recent project documents narratives of loss and survival among those who have suffered paramilitary violence in Colombia. Some of these photographs have been published on the Web site “Crimes of War.” View her award-winning images here.
Donna DeCesare has an M.Phil in Literature and Comparative Studies from the University of Essex in England. When she is not teaching at the University of Texas she continues to photograph and to conduct photography workshops for at-risk youth, journalism students and professional photojournalists in the US, Spain and in Latin America.
DeCesare is a member of the Executive Board of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Recent Courses: J316 Photographic Communication, J370K Advanced Photojournalism, J380M Advanced Projects in Photography, J388 Seminar in Photographic Criticism, J395.3 Documentary Video and J395.4 Documentary Tradition of Latin America.