Dawn Aronson was born in California in 1953. She studied art at San Francisco State University. For twenty years she designed clothes in the name of her own company Gianni Schicchi (reflecting her love of opera) in Los Angeles and San Francisco (1973-1984) and New York (1984-1994).

In 1995 she moved with her husband Christopher Hunt to Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; there she devoted herself to what had before necessarily been secondary pursuits: designing costumes for the theatre, and photography. For two years she was part of the design department of William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt. In that time she also designed costumes for three productions at Frankfurt’s English Theater.

Aware of her lack of technical training in photography, she applied for—and was delighted to be accepted in—a postgraduate photography course at Central St. Martin’s School of Art in London, where she moved with her husband in August 1999. During the first months in London she was also auditing Richard Sennett’s course on The Image of the City, at the London School of Economics, and designing the costumes for a new Christmas production of Beauty and the Beast at Brighton’s Komedia Theatre. Two weeks before that premiere she flew to San Francisco for the weekend to surprise her father on his 80th birthday. She died six weeks later, of complications from ‘flu, on December 27th 1999.