Donatella’s journey is a journey of different experiences, places. Journeys combining many lives into one. Born in Catania, Italy, she has been sharing her time between Italy and California with extensive travels in between that have taken her from Japan to Patagonia, Australia, Egypt, Fidji, most European countries and many more.

Donatella earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations (Pomona College, California) and a Juris Doctor Degree from the Italian State University in Catania. During the years after university, Donatella worked as a lawyer with an Italian American law firm in Los Angeles but then transitioned to her passion: art photography and writing, two different methods of narrating people and places.

Her photographs have been exhibited in several personal and collective shows and are in public and private collections and museums among which the Center for Photography at Woodstock, United States; the National Photography Museum in Brescia, Italy; the Carrara Academy in Bergamo, Italy; the Center for Research and Archiviation of Photography in Spilimbergo, Italy; the Latvian Museum of Photography in Riga, Latvia; the Women in Photography Archive Collection at Yale University, United States.

She has organized several art shows for Women in Photography and for several photographers, she has curated the making of a photography archive for the Tourist Bureau of the province of Catania, Italy, and she has been a member of the Visual Arts Consultation Team for the city of Catania. She has taught sales promotion, direct marketing and public relations in English at the European School of Economics in Catania; from 1990 to 2002 she wrote for newspapers and magazines like Cosmopolitan and Anna, and during 2017-18 for L’Italo-Americano newspaper in Los Angeles.

She has published three photography books: Catania Botanical Gardens; La Pietra di Fuoco, Sicilia Singolare Femminile, a novel, Arianna e il Minotauro, and Sotto uno Stesso Cielo, a book of photos and texts which are the result of an extensive research on prisons in Italy. In those years she was admitted to MENSA and was very active in Rotary International earning three Paul Harris Fellowships.

In the early 2000s, she transitioned to managing her family real estate and, with her husband, started a jewelry manufacturing company producing unique pieces made with natural flowers. In the second decade of the years 2000, in a new change of life, she moved full time to California where together with her husband and son she founded a hospitality business made up of a restaurant, Pronto Cucina Italiana in San Clemente, California, and a boutique Italian gourmet foods, wines and spirits shop.

This move gave Donatella the chance to enter a new universe and she became very passionate about wines and their terroirs as well as about the history of the vines and the wines. She has just been named Italian Wine Ambassador by Vinitaly International Academy, a certification that is considered the gold standard of Italian wine education. Previously, Donatella had received the certification of Italian Wine Scholar with highest honors from the Wine Education Guild and the WSET 2 with honors.

An avid hiker and traveller, Donatella is fluent in Italian, English, French and Spanish.

Writing and photographing are two wonderful and complementary tools to tell the story of people and places and bring to other people’s eyes different realities and perspectives keeping alive traditions which sometimes risk to disappear (D.P.)