Deborah Fisher is the founding Executive Director of A Blade of Grass, and a strategic and philanthropic advisor to Shelley and Donald Rubin. She also currently serves on the board of the Center for Artistic Activism.
Fisher is a practicing artist and creative leader working to expand the roles art and artists play within communities. She has worked in many capacities at the intersection of art and civic life in New York City, including as studio manager at Socrates Sculpture Park, and as an educator and curriculum developer for the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment. She writes and lectures internationally about her own practice, arts funding, and socially engaged art, for Temporary Art Review, Americans for the Arts, Queens Museum, Hammer Museum, Otis College of Art and Design, Portland State University, and Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv. Fisher has also participated in a number of roundtables and planning sessions that seek to improve arts funding and understand the impact of and enrich discourse around socially engaged art, including the NYC Cultural Agenda; Arts and Impact Think Tank at Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley; Creative Change, an initiative of the Opportunity Agenda; and the Art and Social Justice Working Group initiative of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School.
Fisher’s art practice is largely organized around public sculpture and social projects, and is focused on how systems of value, waste, and meaning are created, both materially and socially. She has been commissioned for large-scale public sculptures by the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art and Middlebury College’s Art in Public Places program. Her artwork has been featured in publications including Street Art NYC, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, New York Daily News, WNYC’s Morning Edition, and Weekend America.
