Paul D’Amato

Paul D’Amato teaches at Columbia College and is currently photographing in the African-American community on Chicago’s west side for a project called “We Shall,” which was published as a book in 2013. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. Paul is a graduate of 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 spent the next 14 years photographing neighborhoods that were made into the book, “Barrio.”