Born in 1970 in San Antonio, Texas, Deborah Lawrence Schafer lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned an A.B. in Visual Arts from Princeton University, Schafer and then worked in art museums for over a decade in curatorial and tech-related capacities. After some detours, Schafer emerged as a multimedia artist.

Born to a Mexican mother, Schafer questions the prevailing industrial Western worldview in which human beings are separated and disconnected from the natural world, allowing exploitation and devastation. Using diverse materials for her investigations, from rituals and scientific data to writings from various sources, Schafer gives new interpretations of the world mainly in the form of painting, digital collage, photography, and video to realize symbolic restoration. Recent work explores the complex construction of identity and gives rise to stories that have been silenced.

​Schafer’s work has been exhibited nationally including in Texas, Maine, Nevada, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and is featured in numerous private collections. In 2020, she was a R.A.R.O resident in Madrid, Spain.