Debra Yepa-Pappan

Debra Yepa-Pappan is an artist in digital multimedia, focusing heavily on photography and digital collaging. Most influenced by her multicultural upbringing, with a South Korean mother and a Native American father, her work reflects the struggle of identity, modernity, and stereotypes revolving around Native American culture.

Life Yepa-Pappan was born in South Korea while her father was stationed in the country with the U.S. Army. She grew up in Chicago where her family immigrated when she was very young. She attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe with a degree in 2- and 3-dimensional art in 1992, before she proceeded to Columbia College Chicago. She met her husband, Chris Pappan, while attending IAIA. , they live in Chicago with their daughter. She takes photographs and digital images and layers and distorts them to create complex images to make bold statements. Yepa-Pappan uses the contrasts of her differing cultural lives to talk about living between two worlds and tends to pose questions to the viewer versus answering them. Dual(ing) Identities, solo exhibition at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, 2012 Program Coordinator for Title VII Indian Education program at Chicago Public Schools