Donna Williams
Donna failed early secondary education, leaving at age 15 after 4 high schools. She entered the workforce for three years and encountered unemployment and homelessness before return to education at 18, going on to get an Honours Degree in Sociology, a degree in Linguistics and a postgraduate Diploma in Education.
As well as being an artist, sculptor, composer and screenwriter, she is also an internationally best-selling author with 9 published books in the field of Autism including four text books.
One of the most well known people with autism in the world, Donna is a renowned international public speaker, a qualified teacher and worked as an autism consultant since 1995 working internationally with over 600 people on the autistic spectrum.
Donna lives with a degree of both meaning deafness and meaning blindness (agnosia) and, unlike the 65% of the general population who ‘think in pictures’, describes herself as a systems and kinaesthetic and musical thinker for whom systems, movement, pattern, theme and feel and give definition to her world.
As someone challenged with gut, immune and metabolic disorders, she is well known for raising wide public awareness regarding health as well as sensory perceptual, language processing and anxiety related issues effecting people on the autistic spectrum.
Her first of four autobiographical works, Nobody Nowhere, spent 10 weeks at number one on the New York Times Bestseller List, sold over half a million copies worldwide and has been published in over 20 languages worldwide. Her second book, Somebody Somewhere (the second of four books in her autobiographical series) also became an international number one bestseller. Her life story is currently under option by a Hollywood film company and another of her screenplays (all of her films are represented by Bicoastal Talent, Burbank, CA) was commended in the Australian National Literary Awards in 2007.
After 13 years living in the UK she now lives back in Australia with her husband Chris Samuel where they established the world's first international self employment service for people on the autistic spectrum at www.auties.org . Www.auties.org is a free service and also provides a facility for people on the spectrum to demonstrate their skills and products, find work partners, form their own activities clubs and dinner groups.
*printed with permission
*DONNA WILLIAMS
Born 1963 – AUSTRALIA
Donna Williams was born in Australia
in 1963. She was assessed in infancy
as psychotic, then labeled disturbed
throughout childhood before being
diagnosed as autistic in 1990. Donna
grew up with ‘dysfunctional language’
and came to understand sentences
around the age of nine and by age 13
could speak in litanies.
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