Donna Gottschalk

Donna Gottschalk is an American photographer and a lesbian activist born in 1949. She grew up in New York City, in the Lower East Side. She joined the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1969. The same year she joined the Gay Liberation Front, becoming an active member of the movement. In 1970, she and other activists organised the Lavender Menace action during the National Organisation for Women congress, to protest against the exclusion of lesbians from the women’s liberation movement. In 1971, she moved to San Francisco with her sisters Myla and Mary where she worked as a taxi driver. She then joined a photographic printing company before moving to Connecticut where she established her own lab with a partner. In the late 1990s, she became a nursing auxiliary and moved to Vermont. In 2018, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York organised the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to her work. Throughout her life, Donna Gottschalk kept photographing her loved ones, her siblings, butch, fem, trans, gay activists, comrades and friends.