Deborah Valoma

Deborah Valoma is an associate professor of Textiles at California College of the Arts. As Director of Fine Arts from 2008 to 2011, Deborah oversaw twelve fine arts undergraduate programs and one graduate fine arts program. During her three-year term as director, she and Associate Director of Fine Arts Mark Takiguchi organized the Craft Forward Symposium in 2011. From 2005 to 2008, Deborah also served as Chair of the Textiles Program.

Deborah's specialized field of research 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 including “Cloth and African Identity in Bahia, Brazil,” published in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and “The Impermanent Made Permanent: Textiles, Pattern and the Migration of a Medium,” published by Fiberarts.

In 2010, Deborah edited and wrote the introductory essay for a special issue of Textiles: Journal of Cloth and Culture on the topic of dust, and is editing a special issue of Journal of Modern Craft entitled Craft Forward. She is currently on sabbatical, working on the publication of a forthcoming book on the preeminent Native American weaver in California entitled The Past in Present Tense: Four Decades of Baskets by Julia Parker to be published by Heyday in 2013.

Also 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. Recently, Deborah has also resumed her career in design, producing costumes for several dance companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Deborah was recently an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR 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. Click here to view video: http://vimeo.com/28156299.

Deborah has also served on the board of directors of several community-based art organizations that focus on the preservation of traditional performance arts from diverse cultures and countries, including Cuba and Brazil. She is engaged in ongoing collaborations with other artists, including an upcoming oral-history project at CCA entitled History in the Making.