Deborah Fisher

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.