Deborah "Deb" Cullen earned her Ph.D. in 2002 from the City University of New York Graduate Center with a dissertation on the African-American master printmaker Robert Blackburn. Cullen was curator of the print collection at Blackburn's New York-based Printmaking Workshop from 1993 to 1996 and arranged for some 2500 of its holdings to be acquired by the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. She is the curator of a retrospective on Blackburn, planned for fall 2014 at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African-Americans and the African Diaspora, at the University of Maryland, College Park.