Deborah Sussman Joins Our Team!

Deborah Sussman

Arizona State University Art Museum is pleased to announce that Deborah Sussman has joined the Museum as PR Specialist.

“Deborah is a perfect addition to the museum team; her deep involvement with the arts, honed journalistic skills, sharp critical thinking and digital fluency set her up as the perfect connect point between what is evolving in the museum and the wider community, locally, nationally and internationally,” say Gordon Knox, Director of the ASU Art Museum.

An arts writer for local and national publications, Sussman has both covered and been an integral part of the arts community in the Greater Phoenix area for many years. The breadth of her experience, combined with her knowledge of the museum and its mission, uniquely qualify her to promote the place that Raphael Rubinstein of Art in America deemed “the single most impressive venue for contemporary art in Arizona.”

In addition to writing criticism, Sussman has collaborated on a variety of projects with local artists and institutions. In May of this year, she traveled to Sydney, Australia, under the auspices of the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts School of Art, as part of a contingent from Arizona attending the Sydney Biennale, and posted dispatches from Sydney on the ASU Art Museum blog. Last year, she was invited to provide the text to accompany a series of images by Denis Gillingwater, for an exhibition of his work in Rome. In 2007, together with Phoenix artist Jon Haddock, she created My Art Detour, an original comic for Phoenix New Times.

Sussman is a founding member of Collective Gesture, an online community of artists, curators and writers. She was responsible for curating the Collective Gesture group installation and event Garage S., in 2003, as well as the 2005 show Motherload, an installation by Sue Chenoweth and Melinda Bergman at the Writer’s Bloc in Phoenix; she also co-curated Textology: The Art of Letters at the Tempe Public Library in 2004. As an artist, her work was included in Do Me, a 2007 Collective Gesture show at Trunk Space, and in the 2003 show You Still Draw Like a Girl, at Sixth Street Studios.

A graduate of Smith College, where she studied comparative literature and art, Sussman began her career assisting downtown New York gallerist Barbara Flynn, and later worked as an editor at Scholastic Magazines. She received her Masters in English/Creative Writing from Hollins University, and her MFA in Fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She has taught creative writing at UVa, Phoenix College, and Changing Hands Bookstore, among others; currently she teaches a course on writing art and design criticism for ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts School of Art, as well as co-teaching the creative writing workshop Mothers Who Write for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sussman comes to ASU from Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, where she served as associate editor, reporter and opinion writer for more than five years. Her work there garnered numerous local and national honors, including two first-place awards for editorial writing from the Arizona Press Club. Sussman’s art criticism has been published in Art in America, ARTnews, and art ltd., as well as on artforum.com, and her literary criticism has appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times. She is also a commentator for KJZZ, the local NPR affiliate.