Episode # 10 - Castaway: Donna Galluzzo

Donna Galluzzo says, “There’s no doubt that my love of storytelling comes from my family, most especially my mom.  This is how she grew up, in a family that was Catholic, Italian, Irish and German, in a town called Ossining – just outside of New York City and home to the infamous Sing Sing Prison. Sing Sing was the place where the Rosenberg’s were executed, a famous reference in James Cagney films when he was talking about going “up the river,” and the place where her grandfather had been a prison guard with 50 years of service at the “Big House.” In more recent years, her hometown has received notoriety as a bedroom community for Manhattan and home to Don Draper from the popular television series, Mad Men.

The first time Donna left NY was to go to college in Maine. Right after graduation she found myself back in NY, in the South Bronx, in a neighborhood made famous from a 1981 Paul Newman film, Fort Apache, The Bronx . She was teaching third grade at, The Immaculate Conception School. To this day, that remains one of the biggest learning experiences in her life. All she can say is, "Hollywood didn’t embellish at all in portraying the neighborhood."

A year in the South Bronx will tempt anyone to get out of New York for a while. Donna moved to DC to be with a group of college friends and wound up staying for almost 8 years. The recession happened, and she decided to live off of her modest retirement fund – accumulated during a stint working for Merrill Lynch. She gave away everything she owned, made sure her belongings would fit into a Toyota Camry and after a cross country trip to Alaska, made in a car that wasn’t hers with a person she hardly knew and no working radio, she flew back to DC and left to come to Maine, a place she had long wanted to return to.  Donna says, " I have been here ever since. A few years after I moved back I was taking a photography class through MECA’s continuing education programs and I saw a poster – just outside the darkroom – that really caught my eye. It was of a young girl, surrounded by her family – generations at the table, in their kitchen somewhere in Maine- making sausage. I immediately thought, “that’s the kind of photography I’d like to do.” I called the Salt Center for Documentary Field Studies (as it was called back then) and asked if I could volunteer. I was coaxed into applying and spent a semester there studying documentary photography. A few years after I completed the program, Pam Wood, Salt’s founder, called me and asked if I was interested in coming in and interviewing for a job. I wound up working there part-time, Pam retired and somehow, just a few years after I’d come back to Salt to work, I found myself leaving a board meeting in total disbelief, having just been appointed Executive Director. That was about 2003, and I’m still at Salt, now called the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and about to celebrate our 40^th anniversary in 2013. Now, Donna really does feel like she's come home, to live and work in a place with strong community and great stories.