DOMESTIC ABUSE AWARENESS INC.

Twenty-five years ago, while working on a story about a couple in love, photojournalist Donna Ferrato saw a man beat his wife. Until then she thought the greatest threat of danger to women came from strangers. Suddenly her eyes were opened to the darker side of family life. The experience changed her life as a photographer, starting her on what has evolved into a life-long mission to explore and understand the abuse of women and children by the ones they love.

Her photographs bring us to the homes of battered women, to emergency rooms, shelters, courtrooms, activist rallies, batterers' groups and women's detention centers. Collected in her exhibition and publication LIVING WITH THE ENEMY (Aperture, 1991), these groundbreaking pictures are paired with texts by Ferrato drawn from her conversations with the victims and perpetrators of abuse.

Shortly after her book was published, a New York women's shelter approached her to explore the possibility of creating a benefit exhibition of photographs from the book. The exhibition was a huge success, not only in raising badly needed funds for the shelter, but also in educating the public.

Before long, Ferrato was inundated with similar requests from shelters around the country. To cope with the demand and be true to her commitment to expose the horrors of domestic violence through photography, she formed a non-profit organization, Domestic Abuse Awareness, Inc. (DAA, Inc.). With her images, Ferrato’s mission has been to expose and eradicate violence through awareness, education, and action.

Today DAA, Inc. is internationally recognized as the visual resource and communication center on domestic violence. The photographs have been used to raise awareness by schools and universities, galleries, shelters, courts, prisons, medical associations, politicians, and teachers. They have also been seen on television programs, billboards, posters, film documentaries, newspapers and magazines internationally.

For her documentation of domestic violence, she has received numerous awards, including the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanistic Photography and the Kodak Crystal Eagle for Courage in Journalism. Her domestic violence documentation has appeared in publications including Life, Time, People Weekly, USA Today, The New York Times Magazine, MS. and in television reports on domestic violence, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, CBS' America Tonight, Good Morning America, Dateline, Eye on America, NBC Now, The Crusaders, Court TV and Rolanda.

Domestic Abuse Awareness, Inc. is based in New York City.