Donna Louisia (Fuller) Avery was born January 4, 1950 in Augusta, GA to Ruby M. Williams and Mose Fuller.

She graduated from Immaculate Conception Academy High School in 1967 with honors, and was always a scholar, even skipping the second grade. She graduated from Hampton Institute (now University) with a BS in Clothing and Textiles and went on to become the first black woman to graduate with a Masters in Textile Science and Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. She received another Master’s Degree from Georgia Tech in Textile Management and Apparel Engineering.

She was married in 1971 to Daniel Edward Avery, Jr., a Vietnam Veteran and Nurse, also from Augusta, GA. 

After years of battling a hostile Corporate environment as a black woman in the 1980’s, where she was often overlooked and under-appreciated, she found her true calling, and became a Part-Time Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1992, until 1995. She also became a Part-Time Professor at NYC College of Technology in 1994 and taught there for over a decade. In 1998, she became a Part-Time Professor at Parsons School of Design, where she taught for 20 years. 

Lovingly known as “Professor A”, she had no choice but to retire in 2018, while battling a neurological condition which affected her motor skills. Professor A was a Textile & Fashion Industry Specialist and Expert. She loved knowledge, teaching, and her students so very much. She wasn’t going to let a little degenerative diagnosis stop her, so she continued to work and create from home. 

She was always ahead of her time as an entrepreneur and innovator, loved to network, and was a social butterfly. She started her own internet company WOMEC at the dawn of the internet in the 1980s after a corporate layoff, and before computers existed in almost all households. Besides being an entrepreneur, she was also a self-published author, having self-published two series of books, The Risks Of Ro, and The Nusical Motes and the Misterioso Chronicles of Opera Libretto. She holds the US patent 8,756,909 B2 which is an Aircraft Engine Protection Device.  She also holds a patent for a Shock Absorption Device created for football helmets. She also had 2 other patents and several inventions in development at the time of her ascension.

She was also the President and Inventor of the CtFOT Group LLC and CtFOT Media LLC (Consume the Future Of Textiles). She took her decades of research and data that she collected as a Professor, and created TheFashCP™ a fashion and consumer product online database. 

She was the matriarch of a small family whom she guided and nurtured. She is survived by one god-daughter, Tamara D. Rainey (Augusta, GA) one beloved sister, microbiologist Potice Wimberly (Atlanta, GA), one nephew, animator Christos Perry (Atlanta, GA), one grandchild, University of Southern California Presidential Scholar Hera Jachi Aziza (Los Angeles, CA), and one daughter, Tony Award nominee De’Adre Aziza (New Jersey), a host of wonderful friends, colleagues, and a multitude of students, whom over the course of her 26 year teaching career, she loved with all of her heart.

She was a member of St. Anastasia’s Catholic Church for a number of years, and also The Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Augusta, GA for her entire life. She was a God-loving, faithful, prayerful, and devoted servant of God.