"Taking a point of view is part of a documentarian’s role. A photographer can’t fully reflect her subject’s point of view if she is professionally and emotionally detached. To tell the story, she has to live it to some degree... For De Cesare, that meant gaining the confidence of people who yielded their trust to strangers only reluctantly, trust being one casualty in a war where the enemy may be a shopkeeper or your neighbor."

--Steve Wolgast, News Photographer magazine

Donna De Cesare has documented the lives of young people in Los Angeles and Central America, where poverty, US immigration policy and gang culture intersect. ….Her photographs capture the struggles of family life in dangerous times, brotherhood in the streets, and just how early children can be pressed into service as soldiers. …The images offer a sense of the tremendous scope of DeCesare’s work and the scale of the troubles she documents.

--Patrick Michels, The Texas Observer