BIO

Donna Pinckley was born in Louisiana and has lived in the South all her life. Her work has dealt with the human condition and the intimate relationship between the subject and her audience and has evolved into her current body of work that deals with racism. Shereceived a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from Louisiana Tech University and a Master of Fine Arts in photography from University of Texas at Austin. 

She has received Visual Artist Fellowships from the Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA and the Arkansas Arts Council. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in over 200 solo/juried shows that have included the Griffin Museum of Photography and The Royal Photographic Society International Photography Exhibition160 in Bath, United Kingdom. She is included in several public collections, such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana, the University of VeraCruz at Xalapa, VeraCruz, Mexico, and the Photographic Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 

In 2022, she was chosen as one of Black and White Magazine’s Portfolio Contest Winners and in 2021 was chosen as the Single Image Winner in Portraiture. In 2018, she was a Finalist for the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture and won First Place for People/Culture at the International Photography Awards (IPA) that included being in the IPA’s Best of Show Exhibition. In 2017, she was awarded an Honorarium at the Houston Center for Photography’s Members Show and in 2016, she was the first recipient of the Josephine Herrick Photography Award for combining photography with social justice. Additionally, she was selected for PhotoLucida’s Critical Mass Top 50 exhibition. 

 She has been published in GEOGermany, The Photo Review magazine, Black and White (UK), Photography Quarterly and the online photography publications, www.slate.comand www.theguardian.com and www.huffingtonpost.com. She is currently Professor of Art at the University of Central Arkansas.