Debra Wacks received her Ph.D. in Art History from The Graduate Center in NYC. She lived in Hong Kong for over ten years and currrenty resides in California.
She curated the multi-media exhibition “SMIRK: women, art, and humor” in New York (2001).
She co-authored “Being There: The Tribeca Neighborhood of Franklin Furnace,” forThe Drama Review (MIT Press and New York University, Spring, 2005).
In 2011, she published “Playing with Dada: Hannah Wilke’s Irreverent Artistic Discourse with Duchamp,” in the book From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art (Pennsylvania State University Press).
In 2010, Wacks moderated the panel: “The Challenge of Archiving Performance Art” for the “Action Script–Symposium on Performance Art Practice and Documentation in Asia” in Hong Kong, which was organized by Asia Art Archive.
Currently, she teaches art history at the Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, CA and is completing a book entitled: Subversive Humor: The Performance Art of Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, and Adrian Piper.