By design, interactive tabletops and surfaces provide numerous opportunities for data visualization and analysis. In information visualization, scientific visualization, and visual analytics, useful insights primarily emerge from \emph{interactive} data exploration. Nevertheless, interaction research in these domains has largely focused on mouse-based interactions in the past, with little research on how interactive data exploration can benefit from interactive surfaces. These proceedings represent the results of the DEXIS 2011 Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces. It was held in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (ITS) in Kobe, Japan on November 13, 2011. The introduction summarizes the published papers of the workshop and points to results from workshop discussions. The remainder of the proceedings is made up of the position papers submitted to the workshop.