Deb started her design study as an architecture student at Australia’s University of Queensland in 1991 and going on to complete a stage design degree at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). Starting on The Matrix (1999) as a set designer, she then worked on Anna and the King (1999) in Malaysia and returned to Sydney for Moulin Rouge! (2001). Deborah’s first involvement in large-scale event art direction was the closing ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Mentored by the production designer Brigitte Broch, Deborah worked as Broch’s art director on Real Women Have Curves (2002) in Los Angeles, followed by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003). The 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, and the opening of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China, kept her hand in large-scale special events.
Deborah moved to Los Angeles in 2008, and became the production designer of the fourth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which finished production in 2018. She earned four consecutive Emmy Awards and three Art Directors Guild Awards and a BAFTA for her work on the epic medieval fantasy.
Following time in design development at HBO and Lucasfilm, she has recently designed the Netflix science fiction television series, The Three-Body Problem based on the novel of the same name by Liu Cixin, to be released in late 2024.
