Debra Pearlman is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Walker Art Center, New York Public Library, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum Sztuki, and Smith College Museum, among others.

Debra is a recipient of The Meredith S. Moody Residency at Yaddo, a grant from The Peter S. Reed Foundation, a Special Editions and an Individual Artist Grant from the Lower East Side Print Shop, and a grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, whose work has been shown nationally and internationally. Debra’s work has shown most recently with the exhibition Take One Action 2026, a project through Art At A Time Like This, through which digital mobile trucks circulate through the streets of New York City showing the work of selected artists as part of the national campaign Fall Of Freedom. She is currently participating in the group show Evolving Freedoms at the Maguire Art Museum in Philadelphia, and will show this winter with Ejecta Projects in Carlisle, PA.

Debra’s work appeared in the group shows at 5-50 Gallery in Long Island City, Currents New Media 2025 in Santa Fe, and in (G)narly at Icebox 4. Her banner Supergirls V O T E showed at Powerhouse Arts. She has had two solo shows at Five Myles Gallery, First Language and Roundabout; her one-person show A Kind Of Language appeared at Project: ARTspace in conjunction with Odetta Gallery, and was included in the Zürcher Gallery's Salon Zürcher 5th Edition: 11 Women of Spirit. She has shown in the past at galleries including Catskill Art Space, Icebox 4, Garvey Simon, SLAGRX, Exit Art, The International Print Center, The Biennial in Lodz, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and The Chicago Renaissance Society. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Print Collector’s Newsletter, Time Out critic’s choice, Art in America, The Chicago Sun-Times and elsewhere, most recently in Cultbytes (2026). She received her M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her B.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts.

Debra’s work pushes the boundaries between sculpture and photography, as she prints images of children, most of which originate in her own candid photographs, on a variety of substrates, such as aluminum, which can bend and become unique three-dimensional objects that challenge the viewer’s perception of scale and perspective. Her paintings are sculptural, too, with textile-like surfaces of glass beads or magma laid or poured over the painted and printed image. Debra continues to transform and integrate her images over time, in a range of materials, while exploring their ambiguity and metaphorical significance.