My work deals with themes of human and nonhuman intelligence, and what it means to return home when the nature of home itself is nebulous and undefined. As an interdisciplinary artist with homebases in painting and printmaking, I explore the interstitial spaces between these and other media, relishing the borderlands–the slippage between idea and medium. Lens based ways of looking interact with a fierce love of materiality that echoes the earth itself, and the ways in which humanity interacts with the homeostatic systems that comprise Gaia, the living earth.
My undergraduate degree is in painting but I have taken a long and circuitous route through printmaking, textile, woodworking, and digital media, to find myself back where I started- pencil in hand, observing. Part of my methodology is researching what I need to know/learn to bring my ideas to life. Figure drawing has always been a cornerstone of my practice, even when it’s not obvious in the work. I participate in local figure drawing groups on a weekly basis.
I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Fitchburg State University, teaching Studio Art in the Humanities Department. I served as the Gallery Director for UMass Lowell from 2014-2025, and was awarded an Artist Resource Trust grant for co-curating DRAW Lowell: confluence in 2024. I recently showed my 20-piece silkscreen installation “Perseverance Amidst the Regolith” at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago Chile. I have been honored with ‘Best in Show’ by curators Lauren Szumita and Marie Picard Craig in Juniper Rag’s “Pulp” exhibition in April 2024, and have twice won the Peter McCollum Staff Choice award in the Fitchburg Art Museum’s Regional Exhibition of Art and Craft in 2022 & 2024, which could not please me more. In 2019 I participated in Human Impact: Stories of the Opioid Epidemic at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA. I have shown in the ICA at the Maine College of Art & Design as well as their Bob Crewe Gallery Window, the Brush Gallery in Lowell, MA, The Arts League of Lowell, MA and others. I participated in artist residencies at Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, MA and an Ayatana Nocturne research residency in Ottawa, Canada. In addition, I served as a juror for the Chelmsford Center for the Arts, the Parish Center for the Arts in Westford, MA, The Whistler House in Lowell, Ma, the Loading Dock Gallery in Lowell, MA, and the annual college show at ARTSWorcester in Worcester, MA in 2025. I hold a BA in Studio Art with honors from Wellesley College and an MFA in Studio Art from the Maine College of Art & Design.
Deborah Santoro 