ABOUT

Deborah Yasinsky is a NYC-based artist, curator, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice explores memory, childhood, and ritual. Through experience and imagination, she creates surreal, escapist environments across painting, printmaking, ceramics, drawing, and film, approaching both joyful and traumatic memories through symbolic intermediaries that illuminate despair and hope. Her imagery draws from flora and fauna remembered from her childhood along the Hudson River, the Palisades, and Inwood Hill Park, where figures emerge amid repeating motifs of birds, butterflies, unicorns, forest imagery, flattened perspective forms, and jeweled objects. These elements are juxtaposed with abstractions of memory that celebrate moments of wonder while memorializing painful episodes.

Recollections of visits to the Cloisters inform references to medieval ornamentation and the symbolism of ritual objects drawn from both Jewish and Catholic traditions. Yasinsky’s ceramic works function as narrative vessels, carved in low relief and finished with painterly underglazes and glazes. Her paintings are encrusted with beads, rhinestones, jewelry, glitter, and layered patterning, evoking the experience of exploring her mother’s jewelry box as a child and reflecting on the complex and timeless experiences women share through youth, caregiving, and relationships.

Yasinsky has exhibited her work nationally, including at Coral Gables Museum, Galerie Lucida, Empty Set Gallery, Local Project Art Space, and Dominican University, and has worked with institutions such as Hudson River Museum, 92Y, Stepping Stones Museum for Children, and ArtsWestchester. She is a recipient of the City Artist Corps Grant and was an Artist in Residence on Governors Island with Bronx Art Space. Recent curatorial projects include Ancestral Foods: Family Feasts at Bronx Art Space. She holds an MFA in Painting from Lehman College, CUNY, an MS.Ed in Museum Education from Bank Street College of Education, a BA in Fine Arts and Illustration from Stern College, Yeshiva University, and an AAS in Textile Surface Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Yasinsky is currently Assistant Director and Curator of Education at Lehman College Art Gallery and an Adjunct Lecturer in drawing and art education at Lehman College, CUNY.

Contact: deborahyasinsky@gmail.com

Instagram: @deborahyasinsky