Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 13, 1935, Deborah Belle Meranski, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Israel Meranski, was deaf from birth. Her early education was exclusively oral, at the Baer School for disabled students (1940-1947) and the private Park School in Baltimore (1948-1954).

She entered Gallaudet College in 1954. Earlier in her life she had little interest in art due to the communication barriers she faced as a deaf person. But she became interested in art and art history through mandatory classes at Gallaudet, and ended up majoring in art since Gallaudet did not yet offer a major in art history. She graduated in 1958 with a BA and spent several years as a housewife.

In 1962, Elva S. Loe, then chair of the Gallaudet art department, went on sabbatical and asked Sonnenstrahl to fill in for her. This was the start of an almost 35-year teaching career at Gallaudet. Sonnenstrahl joined Gallaudet’s faculty as an assistant in the art department, and became a full instructor in art history in 1965.

At the same time, she began studying for a master’s degree in art history at Catholic University of America, and earned her degree in 1967. While teaching at Gallaudet during the 1960s, she also developed an interest in the theater, and directed and performed in many amateur productions.

Sonnenstrahl was named Gallaudet’s Teacher of the Year in 1978, and had the Tower Clock dedicated to her in the same year. She was also later named to the National Congress of Jewish Deaf Hall of Fame in 1990 and was selected as the District of Columbia Professor of the Year two years later.

She was the first deaf person to receive a certificate in museum studies from New York University in 1985, and earned her Ph.D. from NYU in museum studies with a minor in deaf education in 1987. She worked extensively on museum accessibility issues, and served on advisory boards at the Smithsonian, the Capitol Children’s Museum, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She assisted the National Endowment for the Arts on the Museum Training Model Development Project, which helped deaf interns enter the museum field.

Dr. Sonnenstrahl became the chair of Gallaudet’s art department in 1991 and retired from Gallaudet as a professor emerita in 1996. Her book, Deaf Artists in America: Colonial to Contemporary, a definitive survey of deaf contributions to the art world, was published in 2002 and won a Benjamin Franklin Book Award in 2003. Dr. Sonnenstrahl was inducted into the Gallaudet University Hall of Fame in 2014 as Deborah M. Blumenson, her current married name.

Besides Dr. Sonnenstrahl, this collection includes some material related to two other women who were involved in art at Gallaudet. Judy Mannes Bortner served as curator in Gallaudet’s Office of Fine Arts before Dr. Sonnenstrahl took over as director. In this capacity, Bortner was responsible for expanding Gallaudet’s art collection and arranging for loans and exhibits of art at the university.

Frances Parsons (1923-2013) was a deaf educator and writer who served as a long-term member of Gallaudet’s staff and later the art department. At the time covered by this collection, she and Dr. Sonnenstrahl shared the job of teaching undergraduate art history courses.