Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that question power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool, and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, broadcast, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, evolution, sisterhood, and faith. Stratman has exhibited internationally, including venues MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY), Flaherty Seminar and festivals Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, True/False, Locarno, and Rotterdam. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.
Stratman received an Alpert award in 2014, was a USA Collins Fellow in 2015 and a Sundance Art of Nonfiction fellow in 2018. She received an UNDO Fellowship in 2021 to explore research ideas around "Last Things" project with NYC based writer and scholar Sukhdev Sandhu.
During her 2014 residency she worked on creating ephemera for "Subsurface Voids" — a temporary museum of sinkholes at Hallwalls in Buffalo, NY. During her residency in 2021, she edited and shot interstitial imagery for her film Last Things, which uses science fiction and non-fiction to explore evolution and extinction. She also made 2D work, and collaborated with Fellow and percussionist Peter Kronreif.
