Bio
BIOGRAPHY
Deborah Valoma is the Director of Fine Arts and Associate Professor of Textiles and Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, CA, where she oversees eleven undergraduate programs and one graduate program. In 1978, Valoma graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology. In 1995, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Textiles with High Distinction from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA.
Deborah Valoma's specialized field of research, writing, and teaching is the cultural history of textiles as a global technology and pervasive aesthetic practice. In addition to teaching studio classes, graduate seminars, and a four-semester series of courses on the history of textiles, Valoma has lectured on historical topics including presentations at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Folk and Craft Art Museum in San Francisco. She has written articles on textile related topics for News from Native California, Fiberarts, and the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Costume. Valoma curated The Past in Present Tense: Four Decades of Baskets by Julia Parker, a major retrospective of the premier Native basket weaver in California, and is currently working towards the publication of a book of the same title to be published by HeyDay Books. Most recently, Valoma is co-editing of a special issue of Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture on the topic of dust.
A commitment to the support of arts in the community and to the preservation of traditional practices has led Deborah Valoma to collaborate with art professionals on a series of community-based projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. Beginning in 1996, she served on a founding board of directors of the Julia Morgan School for Girls, where she helped to articulate and develop an integrated curriculum with the arts at its core. For several years, Valoma served on the board of directors of Brasarte, a non-profit organization dedicated to cross-cultural exchange between Brazil and the United States. Subsequently, she was a member of the board of directors of CubaCaribe, an organization with the mission to preserve and promote the artistic heritage of Cuba. Most recently Valoma has begun a project with Allison Smith entitled History in the Making: The California College of the Arts Oral History Project.
Deborah Valoma was primarily raised in Berkeley, California. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she lived in Jerusalem, Israel. In the 1970s she moved again to Israel for a period of five years and lived in the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, where she apprenticed with artist and clothing designer, Jenifer Bar-Lev. In the 1980s she moved back to the United States and lived in New York City, where she studied clothing design at Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology. In 1983, she moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area, and opened a design studio, making one-of-a-kind fashions. In 1995, Valoma completed her graduate studies under the mentorship of Lia Cook at the California College of Arts and Crafts.