User:Dr. Lags Behynd/sandbox

Deborah Susan Wenzel Dozier was born in Toledo, Ohio on 16 July 1951 to Carole Jocelyn James and John Joseph Wenzel. One of six children (John M. (1950), Christopher J. (September to November 1953), Laura A. (1955), Timothy J. (1958), Carole S. (1961) Deborah's parents were unhappy in Ohio and before Deborah was 10 years old she had lived in Michigan, Alaska, Oregon, California, as well as four different homes in Ohio.  By the time she was 7 years old she had traveled extensively through Canada and had been briefly separated from her family in Mexico.  At the age of ten her parents settled in Fresno.  Her father suffered from PTSD after he was rescued from the trenches at the Battle of the Ardenes during WWII and was subject to violent outbursts in which Deborah was regularly battered, strangled, kicked, stripped naked, and burned.  In 1968 she was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.  The remainder of her life was greatly affected by the abuse and over the years, she paid for hundreds of hours of painful therapy to try to overcome the deleterious effects of being a battered child.

She earned a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree from San Diego State University in 1981 and at the age of 31 she left an abusive marriage. She went on to earn two Master of Fine Arts degrees (Syracuse University, Fiber Structure and Interlocking - 1984; Syracuse University, Museology - 1990), a Master of Arts degree (UC Riverside, Anthropology - 1998) and a Ph. D. in Anthropology (UC Riverside, 2000).

Her professional career was long and varied. As a young adult, she was employed in the food service industry. Seeing the value in an education, she began to take classes to improve her employment prospects. Exploiting a lifelong interest in textiles and receiving additional education, by 1983 she had worked her way to Quality Control Manager at Tompkins Fabrics in Syracuse, NY.

She worked as a Home Educator for HeadStart in Medford, Oregon and was later named the inaugural director of the Day Care Center at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, OR. In 1989, she relocated to Southern California to become the Assistant Director of the University of California, Riverside, Art Gallery where she organized and curated the exhibition, Cahuilla Voices: We Are Still Here. Her work with Native communities continued with Native American basketweavers and herbalists of Southern California and Northern Baja Mexico for many years. Organizing her students, she created a small stream of humanitarian aid across the US/Mexico border to aid the impoverished residents of San Jose de la Zorra, Baja California, Mexico.