Debora Dancy

Deborah Dancy, also known as Deborah Muirhead (born 1949), is an American painter of large-scale abstractions in oil; she is also a printmaker and mixed media artist. Her work is also known to encompass digital photography. In 1981, she began to teach at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she taught painting for thirty-five years until her retirement in 2017. She has received awards such as a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Dancy taught painting at the University of Connecticut, Storrs for thirty-five years, before retiring in 2017.

Dancy was the art director and the illustrator of The Freedom Business, a book by her friend Marilyn Nelson.

Public collections

Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio Baltimore Museum of Art Birmingham Museum of Art, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. Detroit Institute of Arts Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa Fine Art Museum, Bardo Arts Center, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, N.C. Fine Arts Museum, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tenn. Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mo. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass. Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Ala. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kans. United States Embassy, Yaoundé, Cameroon

Awards and honors

Women's Studio Workshop Studio Residency Grant Banff Creative Residency Program Grant University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts Outstanding Faculty Award The University of Connecticut Chancellor’s Research Fellowship American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Artist and Writers Creative Arts Fellowship Nexus Press Artist Book Project Residency Award New England Foundation for the Arts Regional National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Artist Grant Danza, Emmie. "Deborah Dancy, Chasing the Light". Gallery Artist Deborah Dancy Reviewed on The Drawing Center Column, "Annotations", The Drawing Center, June 27, 2013 Edwards, Jeff. “‘It’s a Constant Struggle to Keep the 'Thingness' at Bay’: An Interview with Deborah Dancy". Artpulse, 2015 "Front Matter". African American Review, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007 "Flatfile Collection, Queen Bea". Artspace New Haven. 2016 King, Leslie. "Gumbo Ya Ya : Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists". HathiTrust Digital Library, Midmarch Arts Press, 1995 McNALLY, OWEN. “Painter Muirhead peers through a history, darkly". Courant.com, Hartford Courant, September 13, 2018 Mercer, Valerie J., et al. "Examining Identities". Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, vol. 86, no. 1/4, 2012, pp. 66–87. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43492326. Mobilio, Albert. "The Bookness of Not-Books: Modern and Contemporary Artists' Books", The Paris Review, June 22, 2017 Nelson, Marilyn. "The Freedom Business (Ca. 1790)". Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, edited by James Brewer Stewart. by James O. Horton, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, pp. 257–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk4gq.16. Perosino, Bruno. "Marking 35 Years: The Work of Deborah Dancy". The William Benton Museum of Art, July 18, 2017 Raynor, Vivian. "Spirit in the Wood/Paint". The New York Times, Sunday, February 26, 1989 Raynor, Vivian, "Stamford Museum". The New York Times, Sunday: May 2, 1989 Robert, Kiener. "In Works with a Visceral, Spontaneous Feel, Deborah Dancy Explores the Amorphous Zone between Abstraction and Representation". New England Home Magazine Robin Kahn. ROBIN KAHN, January 1, 1970. Rosoff, Patricia. “Small Vistas, The 10-Year Show at 100 Pearl". Hartford Advocate, July 15, 2004. Zimmer, William. "ART; A Glimpse of Contemporary Taste". The New York Times, February 25, 1996. Zimmer, William. "Connecticut Biennial". The New York Times, April 14, 1991.