Deborah Vankin

Deborah Vankin is an award-winning culture writer for the Los Angeles Times, currently covering the ballooning, more than $4 trillion Wellness industry for the paper. For more than a decade, she served as the Times’ visual arts writer, chronicling L.A.’s new museum boom and gallery expansion (touring so many construction sites, she now owns her own hard hat) as well as the varied art emerging in response to our quickly shifting world. She’s interviewed or profiled many of the leading artists of our time, including Mark Bradford, Catherine Opie, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Ai Weiwei and many others. Deborah has also written about TV, film, comedy, books and nightlife for the paper and has been a correspondent at the Oscars, Emmys and Golden Globes, reporting live from either the red carpet, backstage or from inside the show.

Deborah’s features and profiles have won nearly two dozen local and national awards, including from the Society for Features Journalism, the California News Publishers Assn. and the L.A. Press Club. In 2021, she was named a finalist for the Mayborn Literary Non-Fiction’s Best American Newspaper Narrative.

Prior to the Los Angeles Times, Deborah was the books editor and food editor of the LA Weekly and a lifestyle features editor at Variety. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times and in numerous book anthologies.

Deborah regularly appears on television and radio, as well as at staged events, speaking about her work. Most recently she anchored a mini-documentary, in March 2022, about outsider artist Tory DiPietro. She’s the author of the graphic novel, “Poseurs,” and her creative non-fiction stories have been performed at L.A.’s Spoken Interludes and Word Theatre.

A Philly native, Deborah’s writing career began at Emerson.