dana ray & robbie | writer and artist portraits in harrisburg
I first met Dana Ray in 2021 through our mutual friend and creative colleague, Christine Mitchell (a brilliant writer, designer, photographer, and creative director herself). Christine, Dana, and I worked together on creating imagery that spoke to Dana’s work as author, speaker, and leader, and that branding photoshoot sparked a friendship that has been a sustaining honor and a lovely place to land every year since.
Dana’s work is gloriously multifaceted and deliciously difficult to encapsulate in a succinct way. To use her own words, she is “a multi-genre writer who uses personal experience, literature, and language theory to explore embodiment, disability, and spirituality.”
And of course, this naming challenge is the root of her work. Her brilliant book, Name Your Work: Language to Lead with Intention and Conviction, guides readers of all walks of life through the excavating self-discovery required to speak words to their “unboxable” work. I can personally attest to the wisdom and power held in these pages, and cannot recommend the book (mine is dog-eared, scuffed, and heavily underlined) enough.
This was the motivation for our portrait photoshoot last August: to create portraits of a writer that felt as authentically capacious as Dana’s work. Beyond her book, Dana writes the publication NAMING BLUE, and since we met years ago, Dana and her husband Robbie have become parents to the most inquisitive, independent, gentle, fiery young girl. After moving from the DC suburbs to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Dana and Robbie have poured themselves into the community of the quiet yet vibrant artist town (both she and Robbie are helping build the Harrisburg Tool Library). We therefore began our portrait shoot in one of their most frequented Harrisburg haunts, the fantastic Midtown Scholar Bookstore. (It was frankly quite hard for all of us to commit to the shoot between dozens of pauses to peruse the books ourselves!)
We then walked the streets of Harrisburg, briefly, to capture the essence of their beloved home in their portraits. I loved particularly the reflections of these beautiful rowhomes in the glass behind them, and how the color of the cascading ivy beautifully contrasted with Dana’s absolutely fabulous purple jumpsuit.
We finished in Dana’s home office, where her creativity and capacity for observing, participating, and naming the world is channeled into words that move, expand, and challenge her audiences to find themselves over and over again. It is also where Dana managed the extremely limited release of the print edition of Name Your Work, and it was an honor to photograph the author where both her process and her finished work were produced.
Dana and Robbie, you both are stunning humans and it is a gift to know you. Thank you for your sustaining company and your deep hearts—I cannot wait to see you again soon!