Deborah "Deb" Cullen earned her Ph.D. in 2002 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with a dissertation on the African-American master printmaker Robert Blackburn.
[citation needed] 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..[citation needed] 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.
[citation needed] Since 2013, she has been the Director and Chief Curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York.
She was part of a curatorial team that organized the multi-venue exhibition "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World" at El Museo, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she subsequently co-edited (with Elvis Fuentes) a companion anthology Caribbean: Crossroads of the World (El Museo del Barrio and Yale University Press, 2012).
Cullen is a longtime Associate of the Los-Angeles-based Institute of Cultural Inquiry, for which she edited the 1997 volume Bataille's Eye & ICI Field Notes 4.