Deborah Valoma is professor in the Textiles and MFA in Fine Arts programs, where her specialized field of research, teaching, and writing is the cultural history of textiles as a global aesthetic practice. In addition to teaching a comprehensive series of graduate and undergraduate courses on textile history and theory, she has written articles and essays including “Complex Simplicity” (Kay Sekimachi: Simple Complexity, The Craft and Folk Art Museum, 2016); “Cloth and African Identity in Bahia, Brazil” (Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, 2010); “Lia Cook: In the Folds” (Brown/Grotta, 2007); and “The Impermanent Made Permanent: Textiles, Pattern and the Migration of a Medium” (Fiberarts, 2005).
Deborah has also curated several exhibitions, including most recently, Lines That Tie: Carole Beadle and Lia Cook at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco in 2016.
In 2010 Deborah edited and wrote the introductory essay on the topic of textile ephemerality and dust for a special issue of the leading international peer-review journal Textiles: Journal of Cloth and Culture. In 2013 published a book on the preeminent Native American weaver in California titled Scrape the Willow until It Sings: The Words and Work of Basket Maker Julia Parker (Heyday, 2013). A product of nine years of research, this book traces the cultural practices and creative philosophies of the foremost Native American basket weaver in California and won the 2014 Commonwealth Club’s Gold Metal for Contributions to Publishing.
As a studio artist, Deborah explores the material, conceptual, and poetic nuances of the medium through a hybrid practice incorporating both digital weaving technologies and hand processes. Deborah’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums, including the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Textile Museum, Washington DC. She has also designed costumes for several dance companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 2011 Deborah was an artist in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, in conjunction with the Weaving, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a retrospective exhibition of the work of weaver Laurie Herrick curated by Namita Gupta Wiggers. Her piece, Longing, took the form of an installation and performance that integrated the shared sensual, spatial, and rhythmic dynamics of weaving and dance.
- BA, University of California, Berkeley;
- MFA, CCAC; studied, Mills College, Parsons School of Design
Professor, Textiles Program California College of Art cca.edu
NAFTAE 