List of Famous people who died in 2008

Dino Risi was an Italian film director. With Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Nanni Loy and Ettore Scola, he was one of the masters of commedia all'italiana.

Aharon Amir was an Israeli Hebrew poet, a literary translator and a writer.

Eri Kawai was a Japanese singer from Tokyo, Japan. She graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and both composed and sang not only classic but also pop and world music. She was also friends with well-known video game composer Yasunori Mitsuda and had collaborated with him on some of his works. She died on August 4, 2008 at age 43 after being hospitalized as the result of liver cancer.

Grace Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in their artistic endeavors, included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Frank O'Hara. Her paintings are held by numerous major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As director of the Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting, she influenced numerous young artists.

Norman Dello Joio was an American composer whose output spanned over half a century, and who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

Gerard William "Jerry" Ford was an American businessman who in 1946 founded Ford Modeling Agency with his wife Eileen Ford in their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City.