Born in Boston, Debra Pearlman received her B.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts. She completed her B.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her work challenged the program's traditional definitions of painting and sculpture. It was in Chicago that Pearlman began to transform images of children in paint and painted objects. When she moved to New York, Pearlman rejected paint altogether, and instead began, through repetition, re-orientation, scale and materials, hand printing, and photographic silk-screen and other reproductive techniques, she began producing unique works and multiples. Through fragmentation and re-iteration her work suggested social issues larger than the individual.

One of these early works became Pacifier, a limited-edition book that uses text from the lintels of the former Brooklyn Family Court Building juxtaposed with altered images of an inner-city child, both hidden and revealed by black felt, translucent paper and fabric. In a review of this early work, where unusual material stands in for a caul over that child no one seems able to protect, Nancy Princenthal referred to Pearlman's "grim sensibility."

This image and others continued to resurface in Pearlman's art. Soon after Pacifier, Pearlman created Promise and Some Girls, the latter published with a Special Editions Grant at the Lower East Side Print Shop. And these new collections themselves produced further unique works. The print had become a ready-made substrate.

Most recently, Debra Pearlman has continued her work with fragile and highly textural materials on a grander scale. The large installation she created for the Biennial at Lodz, Poland, House of Children, consists of a series of suspended glass swings, each of which encases a photograph of a sleeping child. Lighted from above to cast shadows on beds of salt below, the images and their iterations become ghosts of one another. Reviewing a subsequent installation of the work in Krakow, Anna Glowa wrote: "Debra Pearlman's work is characterized by a certain elusiveness, a 'phantom-ness.'" On the walls, quotations from the Bible and poetry from Osip Mandelstam and 6th century Hebrew poet Yanni highlight with their very gravity the signified childish lightness of the swing itself. Elisabeth Akkerman writes: "Debra Pearlman's work has always engaged in the discourse of childhood in our contemporary society. Choosing materials such as glass, paper and salt for their qualities of translucency, fragility and life, Pearlman strikes a balance between the intellectual substance and the visual aesthetic of the work."

Debra Pearlman's work appears in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The New York Public Library, The Walker Art Center, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Museum Stuki and others. Pearlman worked as an educator at The Museum of Modern Art, teaching for Lincoln Center Institute and many other institutions, and as a guest lecturer at Princeton University, William Paterson University and others. She received grants from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, Dieu Donne, The Lower East Side Print Shop, Artist Space and other organizations. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, critic's pick in Time Out and The Chicago Sun-Times, The New England Art Journal, Art Matters, The Print Collector's Newsletter, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Polski. She lives and works in Brooklyn.