Meet Patrisha…

…founder/president of Finding Our Voices, a photojournalist named by WOMEN'S e-News as one of 21 Leaders for the 21st Century and regular contributor to Maine’s two daily newspapers, Portland Press Herald and Bangor Daily News.

In 2016, Patrisha's secret of 29 years was outed with worldwide headlines about the domestic violence arrest of her celebrity husband. Read the article in The Irish Times.

Countless women in her small community in Maine revealed to her that they too had been terrorized by an intimate partner, with some saying, “I always wanted to tell my story.” This led Patrisha to create the Finding Our Voices multi-media exhibit of photo portraits and audio recordings of 14 local, women survivors. The exhibit opened in Patrisha’s hometown Camden Public Library on Valentine’s Day 2019 and traveled across the state including four months that fall in the Holocaust and Human Rights Center in the state capitol of Augusta. With COVID, the indoor exhibit turned to outdoor posters, that have spread to 90 Maine downtowns.

Finding Our Voice became a nonprofit in 2021 to fill in the gaps for support to Maine’s domestic violence victims, and gather and amplify survivor voices toward more justice and rights.

Patrisha McLean is an award winning photojournalist with photographs in the permanent collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art.

With Mary Lou Smith, she facilitates an online book club around domestic violence and she is the host of a WERU-FM radio show featuring conversations with survivors of domestic abuse.

Terrified of public speaking during her marriage, in 2022 she gave presentations with her daughter Jackie to the Gender Violence law class at Harvard University and as keynote speakers to the domestic abuse agency serving Chicago’s Jewish community. She was the keynote speaker at Cape Cod’s largest domestic abuse agency, a panelist for a State Department presentation on gender-based violence, and has talked about domestic violence from a survivor standpoint to gatherings of district attorneys, police chiefs, and lawyers and judges.

In the years between escaping her marriage to starting Finding Our Voices, Patrisha fulfilled her long-thwarted dream of exotic travel with scuba diving in Egypt and hiking a monkey forest in Morocco.

Photo by Christina Wnek