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Debora Faccion Grodzki works with painting within an expanded social and historical perspective. She uses painting to activate human corporeality, shifting consciousness towards the connection between the Body and Others (here capitalized to include other human beings, non-human life, inanimate objects, the material and spiritual worlds at large). Her work is rooted in the Latin American tradition of arte engajado/arte comprometida, integrating art into the continuum of life through the daily practice of freedom. She utilizes art history to reveal the theoretical structures that sustained the vitality of artists' practices during challenging political times, such as under the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. From that period, she works with artists such as Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Antonio Dias, Judith Lauand, and Celeida Tostes.
Debora shares her home studio with her children, Helena (6) and Ulysses (3), uniting their work under their family name "Faccion Grodzki Studio." Additionally, she engages in an extended studio practice at the Soil Factory, an art, science, and sustainability community center in Ithaca, NY, where she develops experimental social art projects. She has held year-long fellowships at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Material and Visual Worlds Transdisciplinary Area of Excellence at the State University of New York, and presented her work at various academic and art contexts, including more recently at Cornell University and Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the State University of New York at Binghamton (2022) and an M.A. in Social Communication from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Brazil (2012).
