Deborah Valoma

Deborah Valoma is a professor of textiles and graduate fine arts and chair of the Textiles Program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, CA. From 2008 to 2011 she served as Director of Fine Arts, and was appointed Special Assistant to the Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Studio Assessment for one year in 2013. Currently serves as the Co-Chair of CCA's

Learning and Assessment Leadership Team.

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” (Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion) and "The Impermanent Made Permanent: Textiles, Pattern and the Migration of a Medium" (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. In 2013, she published a book on the preeminent Native American weaver in California entitled Scrape the Willow until It Sings: The Words and Work of Basket Maker Julia Parker (Heyday), which recently won the Commonwealth Club's California Book Awards' Gold Metal for contributions to publishing.

As an 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 Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu; de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Textile Museum, Washington DC.