معرفی
Donna DeCesare is an Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. She joined the faculty following a 20-year career as an award-winning freelance visual journalist with extensive experience documenting Latin America, gang violence, and social issues. She maintains additional affiliations as an affiliate faculty member with the Benson/Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies at UT and serves as a consultant to the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.
Professor DeCesare's research interests focus on visual journalism, documentary photography, Latin American studies, gang violence documentation, and social documentary work. Her career spans decades of fieldwork in Central America, the United States, and South America, with recent projects examining extractive industries in Peru, Argentina, and Ecuador, and the Latin American diaspora in Italy. Her work consistently bridges the gap between journalism, art, and social advocacy, with a particular emphasis on documenting vulnerable populations and social trauma.
Her most significant publication is the bilingual documentary book Unsettled / Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs (2013), which has influenced public discourse and been featured in major media outlets including a PBS Frontline documentary and the New York Times Sunday Review. Her photographic work has been exhibited internationally at prestigious venues including Visa pour l'Image in France, the Venice Biennale, and numerous museums across the Americas and Europe.
- Maria Moors Cabot Award (2013)
- Pictures of the Year International Award
- National Press Photographers Association Award
- Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize
- Mother Jones Award for Social Documentary Photography
- Multiple Open Society Foundation awards
- Fulbright Fellowship
Professor DeCesare teaches a range of courses at UT Austin including The Documentary Tradition in Latin America, Intermediate Photographic Communication, Advanced Visual Journalism, and Photographic Storytelling and Social Justice. Her work with UNICEF in the early 2000s helped develop protocols for photographing children at risk that have been widely adopted by leading NGOs. As a Master Teacher with the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation for Latin American Journalism, she contributes significantly to journalism education across the Americas.
