Deborah Howard grew up in and around the Chicago area. She has lived and worked in Israel, Louisiana and Minnesota and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Deborah received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Professor of Art at University of Denver where she is the Head of the Painting Program. She also taught at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

Selected group exhibitions include the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Tweed Museum in Duluth, Minnesota, the Meadows Museum in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, City College in New York City and the Peace Museum in Chicago.

One-person exhibitions include Regis University in Denver, the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, and EDGE Cooperative Gallery in Denver.

International experience includes Deborah’s 2007 one-person exhibition, lecture and encaustic demonstration at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy, and her 2010 lecture on her work at the School of Art at Renmin University of China in Beijing.

Deborah’s work is included in public collections at the Penrose Library at University of Denver, Kaiser Permanente and Rocky Mountain Records in Denver and the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin.

In 2008 Deborah completed her five year project: Portraits of Child Holocaust Survivors. For the project she interviewed and made drawings of twenty-five Jewish Holocaust survivors in Denver, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The portrait project has been exhibited at the Mizel Cultural Arts Center in Denver, Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas and the Mizel Museum in Denver. The project was reviewed in the Rocky Mountain News and Deborah was interviewed about the project on Colorado Public Radio.

In 2009 Deborah was honored by having four drawings from her portrait project accepted into the permanent collection of the Holocaust Art Museum at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israel.

Cultural heritage, female identity and universal beliefs have been ongoing subjects of Deborah’s work. Experimentation has allowed her to discover different aesthetic forms and keep her work fresh. She has worked in drawing, painting, sculpture and installation using a range of materials including oils, acrylics, cast paper, plaster, bronze and glass. Deborah’s current paintings are done in encaustic, an ancient Egyptian medium that combines colored pigments and molten wax. The colors and textures in Deborah’s paintings have been inspired by the desert landscapes of Israel and New Mexico and the natural environment of Colorado.