Emily DiDonato
Model, Mom, Entrepreneur
The chapter is
still open
Emily has spent a career being someone else’s vision — a model, a chameleon, a vessel for other people’s dreams. Now, eight months pregnant with her third child and building something of her own, she’s learning what it means to choose her own brief. It starts, she says, with sleep.
There is a version of Emily DiDonato that the world memorized: the Glamour editorial, the Maybelline campaigns across 13 years, the face in Times Square at 17 years old, still in high school, standing next to Christy Turlington on the biggest commercial shoot of her life. That version was real. It just wasn’t the whole story.
“I just knew I wanted a life that was bigger than the one I was born into,” she says. She grew up in upstate New York, daughter of a New York City firefighter and a stay-at-home mom. She didn’t have a plan. She had a feeling. The two things are not the same, and she has spent her adult life learning the difference.
The modeling career arrived before she had time to want it. A Glamour shoot in her senior year of high school,