DawnMarie Ferrara is cousin to Rita Moreno and a Native New Yorker, she was raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. DawnMarie experienced many losses very early in her life beginning with the untimely deaths of both her parents. Her father was killed when she was five years old and her mother succumbed to Cancer a year later. At the tender age of six DawnMarie went to live with her maternal grandmother but sadly she too died from Cancer; DawnMarie was eighteen years old.