Paul D’Amato

Paul D’Amato (American, 1956- ) was born in Boston where he attended Boston Latin School at the height of racial unrest, civil rights, and bussing. He moved to Oregon to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country four times a year -often by hitch-hiking and hopping freight trains – as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale he moved to Chicago where he discovered the communities of Pilsen and Little Village. The pictures and writing D’Amato produced there over the next fourteen years were made into the book, “Barrio”. Paul teaches at Columbia College and is currently photographing in the African-American community on the west side for a project called “HereStillNow” which was made into a book the fall of 2017. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago.