Deborah Cullen-Morales

Deborah Cullen-Morales, PhD is a New York-based curator and art historian focused on modern and contemporary Latinx, Caribbean, and African American art and artists. She has served at the Mellon Foundation; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University; El Museo del Barrio; and Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Cullen began working with Blackburn in 1985 and remains involved with EFA RBPMW today. She wrote her 2002 dissertation on Blackburn; curated the retrospective, Robert Blackburn: Passages (Driskell Center, UMD-College Park 2014) and Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking (SITES, 2020-2022), among others.

She founded the Uptown Triennial at Columbia University (2017) and co-founded the S-Files/Bienal (now Trienal) at El Museo del Barrio (1999). She curated Interruption: The 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana, 2013) and was chief curator of El Panal/The Hive: The Third Poligraphic Trienal of San Juan (2012). Other major projects include Caribbean: Crossroads of the World (2012); Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer (2010) and Ferrer’s 2012 monograph; Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (2009); and Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 (2008). Her recent writing will appear in Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology (2025)

Cullen is a longtime member of the board of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, LA. She has far too many books and plants, and is the #1 fan of machine artist, Arnaldo Morales @naldomaldito787