Deborah Artman is a writer, editor and wordsmith. She has worked in opera, publishing, education, theater, radio and film and with composers, directors, performers and visual artists, to name just a few. Her stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous national journals, including American Short Fiction, Puerto del Sol and the New York Times Magazine. A long-time collaborator with Bang on a Can composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, January 2018 marked the world premiere of the chamber version of Artman and Gordon's opera Acquanetta, featured in New York's "bracingly innovative" opera-theater Prototype Festival. Her libretti for the oratorios Shelter and Lost Objects had their U.S. premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and have been performed around the world. Among her awards are ASCAP Plus Awards, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and Fiction Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the MacDowell Colony. Her CD Lost Objects is available through Atlantic Records/Teldec Classics, and her CDs Shelter and Acquanetta (forthcoming) are available from Cantaloupe Records. A former assistant to Senior Editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at Doubleday Publishers, Artman has a wide-ranging career as a freelance editor and currently teaches writing at the University of Hartford/Hartford Art School MFA Program in Photography.

Deborah Artman is a fiction writer, poet and librettist whose career is defined by a restless urge to explore new forms and collaborate often with artists in other media. She has worked in opera, publishing, education, theater, radio and film and with composers, directors, performers and visual artists, to name just a few. Her stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous national journals, including American Short Fiction, Puerto del Sol and the New York Times Magazine.

A long-time collaborator with Bang on a Can composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, January 2018 marked the world premiere of the chamber version of Artman and Gordon's opera Acquanetta, featured in New York's "bracingly innovative" opera-theater Prototype Festival. She worked previously with Gordon, Lang and Wolfe on the oratorios Shelter and Lost Objects, which both had their U.S. premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and have toured across the country and around the world. Her texts have been described by reviewers as "breathtaking," "spare, meditative," "ephemeral," "clever, humorous," and "a journey of wrenching emotions." She is the recipient of ASCAP Plus Awards; her CD Lost Objects is available through Atlantic Records/Teldec Classics; and her CDs Shelter and Acquanetta (forthcoming) are available from Cantaloupe Records.

Born in Washington, DC, and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, Artman's first passions were music and dance. She studied ballet from the age of five until she was sixteen, then modern and jazz dance through college. As a child into her teens, she also studied four instruments: piano, classical guitar, flute and saxophone. A talented singer, she performed in local musical theater productions and began writing songs as a teenager. Meanwhile, with encouragement from teachers at a very young age, she wrote poetry, and soon began receiving awards, scholarships and recognition for her writing in high school. She took her studies seriously, and the connection between breath, the body, the written word, musicality and the spoken voice would always be at the core of all her future work.

After receiving a BA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oberlin College, Artman moved to New York City, where an earlier college internship at the renowned Antaeus Magazine launched her career as an editor. Working in publishing and journalism by day, she moonlighted at night as a roadie for an all-girl punk rock band. To better understand how to write dialogue and how to read her work out loud, Artman took a "performance poetry" class at the Manhattan Theater Club and ventured more deeply into theater and performance, further expanding her voice in playwriting and screenwriting. Similarly, a fiction workshop with Lori Segal at the 92nd St. YMHA began a lifelong fascination with the craft of the narrative.

Mentored by the writers and performance artists Laurie Carlos and Jessica Hagedorn, Artman immersed herself in the multicultural arts community of New York City in the 1980s, traveling from Harlem, to Chinatown, to venues in the Lower East Side, the deep recesses of Brooklyn and the gritty blocks in between. In addition to studies with Carlos and Hagedorn, Artman took classes with David Henry Hwang, Ai, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Carolyn Forché, Jawole Zollar and the Urban Bush Women and many others. Artman collaborated extensively with Laurie Carlos in performances all over the city and around the country; their last project was Artman's direction of Carlos' "performance novel" The Pork Chop Wars in Austin, Texas. Artman became a production manager, dramaturg, writer, co-writer, director, performer and "an extra eye" for an extraordinary array of writers, actors, singers, choreographers and performance artists, including her great friend Carlos, Jenny Romaine, Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Hagedorn, Deborah Karpel, Robbie McCauley, Jawole Zollar, Evangeline Johns and many more.

By the end of the decade, Artman's editing career was flourishing as well, when she began working as assistant to Senior Editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at Doubleday Publishers. Artman went on to have a wide-ranging career as a freelance editor, working on many books by or about outstanding artists, including the dynamic performance artist John Kelly, the mercurial choreographer Jerome Robbins and the legendary bass player Tony Levin. As an editor, Artman has had the great fortune to interview and work with many of the cultural icons of our time, including Toni Morrison, Steve Reich, Alice Walker, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Stephen Sondheim, John Guare, Andre Previn, Nathan Lane, Susan Stroman, Azar Nafisi, Lore Segal and Jane Smiley, to name a few others.

In 1991, Artman received a Fiction Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, which allowed her to focus on her fiction writing. To continue that pursuit, she moved to the Hudson Valley region in 1993. Artman entered the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, receiving her degree in Fiction in 1996. The elements that interest her in fiction are: rhythm, voice, a sense of play in both form and content, and a willingness to tap a variety of notes on the emotional scale. Among Artman's other awards are Fiction Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Her prose poems in the anthology bite to eat place (Redwood Coast Press) were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In addition to working privately with students and writers, Artman has taught writing at the primary, secondary, college and graduate school levels, and she currently teaches writing at the University of Hartford/Hartford Art School MFA Program in Photography.

Artman's curiosity and willingness to experiment extends to a number of collaborative projects with visual artists and filmmakers. She has created book art with Eva Nogiec, paired her writing with Barcelona outsider artist Zush, curated exhibitions, founded an art movement with Bill Liebeskind, provided librettos for films by Bill Morrison, directed a sand painting by Duane Slick and worked with Fawn Potash, Virginia Luppino, Bob Bailey and Tori Ellison on photographic, print, and papier-mâché pieces.

For nearly forty years, Artman has crossed paths and collaborated with an unusual number of extraordinary creative people, expanding her vocabulary, honing her sensibility, aspiring to make a life where her early intensive studies of music, dance and writing and her affinity for the visual arts continue to evolve into new projects, hybrid art forms, multimedia works, inspired teaching, sensitive editing, unexpected language and other manifestations of the desire to be part of a changing creative landscape.