Diana Mara Henry | Author

Diana Mara Henry began her career in photojournalism at Radcliffe, as photo editor of the Harvard Crimson from 1967 to 1969. She received Harvard’s Ferguson History Prize in 1967 and her A.B. in Government in 1969. She has specialized in interpreting social issues and events. Her photography for private literary, social and fashion clients in New York City continue to be widely published in Newsweek, Time, The Village Voice, Le Monde, and to be featured in films such as Makers, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry; The Source; Eye on the 60’s; Everything is Copy films about NYC’s Lower East Side Art Scene including Shadowman and Make Me Famous.

She covered the 1972 and 1976 National Democratic Conventions and the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, McGovern, Lowenstein, Abzug, Holtzman, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and election night in Plains, Georgia. As official photographer for the First National Women’s Conference, she had unlimited access to many women leaders of the 1970’s. These photographs have appeared in government documents, magazines, books such as The Perfect Portfolio, Newsweek’s Pictures of the Year, plays including Gloria: A life; The Heidi Chronicles, and Bella! Bella!.

HONORS. An individual artist’s grant from the NY State Council on the Arts funded her exhibit about the one-room schools of Ulster County. She received a research grant from the Schlesinger Library which houses 500 of her photographs in her named special collection. The accession of her papers and photographic archive, the Diana Mara Henry Twentieth century Photographer Special Collection at U Mass Amherst’s Du Bois Library was celebrated by the Fall reception of the Friends of The Library there in 2016. ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, LECTURER AND TEACHER. The recipient of a 40-day artist-in-residence grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Diana Mara Henry has been a presenter to the American Society of Picture Professionals, the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, the Society for Photographic Education, the French Library and Cultural Center in Boston, the Organization of American Historians, the Berkshire Women’s History conference, among others. MUSEUM PROFESSIONAL. Originator and Director of the Community Workshop Program at the International Center of Photography, NYC, she taught black-and-white and Cibachrome photography there from 1975 to 1979. She served as first Vice-President and Director of Programs for the Alice Austen House, Staten Island, NY, and helped lobby successfully for a more than $1 million grant from the City of NY for restoration of this historic house and creation of the first museum dedicated to a photographer in the U.S.

Solo exhibits and presentations of her work were held at the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the Overseas Press club, NYC, the Organization of American Historians’ Centennial Conference, Radcliffe Institute’s Summer Seminar on Gender Studies in 2008, the panel “Photography as a Political Art” at Harvard in 2009, Amherst College, 2010, the Woodrow Wilson Center, 2011; Manhattan Borough President’s Office, 2012, U Mass Amherst 2013, 2014, 2015 and keynotes for International Women’s Day at Westfield State University, 2016 and Baypath University 2018. Her One-Room Schools exhibit, first shown at the Brattleboro Museum in 1984, reprised at the Vermont Folklife Center and Vermont History Museum in 2014. In 2014 she was honored to participate in the Vermont Studio Center’s Vermont Artists Week. Most recently, her images of little-known events of women’s activism in the US including the Women’s Pentagon Action was the subject of a panel at the Berkshires Conference of Women Historians, 2023. A collection of her work accessioned by the NY State Museum was shown there in their 2022 exhibit, “Captured” and another 100 of her images were accessioned by the NY Public Library in 2024.

Her exhibits include Tribute to the Sixties; NYC Grit and Glam; The 1970’s: McGovern and Democratic Politics; The Women’s Movement; One-Room Schools and Schoolteachers; France: Stud Farm and Castle. The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and the political resistors interned there is an important focus of her photography, writing and research since 1985. Her book I am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter and British Spy was published by Chiselbury Press in 2024. Her books of photography are Women on the Move and A Life in Photography.
Websites: www.iamandre.live, www.spiritofhouston.net, https://mcgoverncelebration.com/photos/diana-mara-henry/,
http://exhibits.library.umass.edu/scua/s/diana-mara-henry/page/overview, https://www.saatchiart.com/dianamarahenry