Deborah Nehmad

Deborah Gottheil Nehmad (born 1952) is an American artist and attorney.

Nehmad was born in Brooklyn.

Deborah Nehmad received a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College in 1974 and a Doctor of Law degree (J.D.) from Georgetown University in 1982. After graduating, she practiced law and worked in politics (including the Carter White House). In 1984, her legal work brought her to Hawaii. Due to a back injury, she phased out her legal practice and began taking art courses at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She eventually matriculated at the latter, receiving an MFA in printmaking in 1998.

Nehmad produced primarily abstract prints employing various techniques, often including pyrography. In recent years, she has been working on the series WASTED, that references the large number of people killed by guns in the United States. The large triptychs in this series have dark abstract shapes representing spilled blood. There are small holes burned into the paper representing the number of people killed by gun violence in the United States. Each hole is stitched over with thread, the color of which indicates whether the death was homicide, suicide, accident, police action, or of undetermined cause.

The Davis Museum and Cultural Center (Wellesley College), the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Hawaii State Art Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Hood Museum of Art (Hanover, New Hampshire), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery are among the public collections holding work by Deborah Nehmad.