Creative "Femme Filmaker" Kathleen Donaghy

Kathleen Donaghy has been managing businesses related to photography, video, and art for over twenty-seven years.

A documentary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and entrepreneur, she began her online endeavors in 1997, researching the holdings of various archives for film footage and photographs related to the subject of one of her films that was being broadcast on public television.

In early 2000, after discovering that eBay was a treasure trove of some of those old documents, photographs, and 16mm/8mm films, she became very adept at successfully bidding on what she wanted, and eventually began auctioning off collectibles for friends.

Seeing the potential of income-producing opportunities online, Kathleen focused over the next several years on businesses that capitalized on the growing internet population and the advances being made with new technologies. Some of these included MLM (Multi-Level Marketing), trading foreign currencies, and marketing fine art photography and sculpture for two artists whose private studio she has managed since 1993. But once she attended The System Seminar in early 2005, the Internet Marketing bug bit her%u2026 and hard.

Kathleen Donaghy, producer, director, and editor of an AMERICAN BEACH, has been managing businesses related to photography, video, and art for over eighteen years. (now 27 years) She has several documentary projects that are completed and in progress.

Some of those include: producer/director/editor of First Person Female, a video diary exploring her experiences with cancer, loss, and the healing process (post-production); producer/director/editor of Boggy Creek Gang Camp, a cinema verité promotional short on Boggy Creek Gang Camp, a camp for children with life threatening illnesses (completed); associate producer/sound recordist/assistant editor of Homecoming: A Meditation on Hair, Rhythm and Ritual, a documentary observation of homecoming weekend at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, which aired on Daytona Beach's public television station WCEU (completed); and producer/director/editor of Fetty Art, a video documenting the life and work of nationally-renowned artist Bob Fetty, chronicling the creation of his sculptures from conception to completion (production). Kathleen's role as associate producer of The ALLIGATOR Book, a documentary film that examines human interactions with alligators, marked the beginning of her professional relationship with its director, Eric Breitenbach.

In 1995, Kathleen was the recipient of the Women In Film/Central Florida Film Finishing Fund for her video production First Person Female . She received a grant from the Southern Educational Communications Association for an AMERICAN BEACH in 1996, and in 1998, the State of Florida awarded her with an Individual Artist Fellowship in Media Arts. In 1999, she was again awarded with the Women in Film/Central Florida's Film Finishing Fund for an AMERICAN BEACH.

Currently, Kathleen is preparing to market her fine art photograph, Spirit, along with the work of other artists, in a soon-to-be-launched site on spirituality and the creative process, and how they both relate to "success."

One site she's working on now will help people jump start their own creativity:
TheArtOfBeingCreative.

Her focus will also include TheMadDashForCash and MakingMillionsWithYourMind, two sites that will center on tools for the internet novice, as well as the psychology and mindset needed in order to succeed online.

....Art is often weird for the artist. Step back after being immersed in it for so long, perhaps years, and its truth can be realized for the first time.

A 15-minute documentary segment, shown in the category ``Works In Progress,'' was ``First Person Female,''

The woman, just awake, wearing only a nightshirt, stands before her bedroom mirror in early morning. She holds a video camera aloft in one hand, and with her free hand lifts her nightshirt and tucks it under her chin. She is naked underneath, and turning to the side she lightly rubs her stomach. It is a tentative caress, as if she is calming a wild animal. The camera holds steady in her other hand and seems separate from the rest of her, a detached observer. In profile her stomach protrudes as if she were pregnant, perhaps at the end of the first trimester. She is not.

Her face holds the deepest kind of worry, a contortion of helplessness and strength. She speaks to the mirror, to the camera, to herself, to no one.

``This is the day. Take a test. Find out a little bit more about what's growing inside of me.''

End of scene. Fade to black.

What was growing inside of Donaghy three years ago was ovarian cancer, a tumor the size of a melon growing from inside the ovary, making it more rare and dangerous.

The filming of her journey through cancer -- her first documentary solo effort -- was shot in the house, in the car driving to and from tests and surgeries, and at the hospital. In the process, crisis became creativity.

Her interesting choice when her ex-husband Mike called was to place the camera on a coffee table at home, pointed at the sofa where she sat. It is the documentary's most moving scene. Several minutes of consoling small talk slowly become something more. After an eight-year marriage in which they tried fertility procedures and ``very much wanted children,'' Donaghy said, Mike has remarried and has two children.

``When I look at them,'' he tells Donaghy in the film over the phone, without thinking, ``I know we did the best thing.'' He then says they are beautiful, and Donaghy says she is sure they are. A couple of minutes later they say goodbye, and Donaghy sits there with the phone in her lap, then lowers her head into her hands.