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A girl’s silhouette gazes at a flock of monarch butterflies, their orange wings vivid against a bleak wintery backdrop. Titled “From Broken Trees,” the piece, , is a personal favorite of Boulder County-based photographer Dona Laurita. “The girl actually witnessed some of her family members, her mother and her baby sister, being killed by the Taliban.

She’s from Afghanistan,” Laurita said in an interview with the Denver Post. “The stories of such loss and devastation and tragedy for a young person to navigate and then come to a country where they don’t know the language, they’re Muslim, they don’t fit right into a community. Those stories stand out to me.



” For the past year, Laurita has provided a safe space for expression, storytelling and community for young refugees through photographs of their silhouettes. “When you get to know somebody, we tend to make our own personal assessments about them,” Laurita said. “It’s almost like looking at them in a silhouette form of life.

We see an outline of a person, but we don’t know what fills them. We don’t see the color of their lives, their landscapes.” Titled Laurita’s work with shadowy figures blossomed in 2013 when she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a project about bullying at a Denver high school.

“This particular high school was having a problem with bullying,” Laurita said. “How could I come in and work with that issue that they had? So I began with usin.

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