Paul D'Amato was born in Boston where he attended Boston Latin School at the height of racial unrest and civil rights. He moved west to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country - often by hitch-hiking and freight trains - as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale he moved to Chicago where he discovered the community of Pilsen. The pictures and writing D'Amato produced there were made into the book, “Barrio" published by the University of Chicago Press.  His book of images made in the African-American community on the west side of Chicago, entitled "Here/Still/Now" published by Kehrer Verlag, was awarded the Lucie Foundation Book Prize in 2018. “Rave” published by Skylark Editions in 2019, is about work made in the underground Techno scene in the early 90’s. He is now finishing work for a book entitled “Midway”.

Paul D’Amato has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy, and a number of Illinois Arts Council fellowships and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago among many others.