Deborah is a Canadian writer and dramaturg. She has worked in a variety of contexts, from festivals to large theatres to film. On screen, Deborah was commissioned to write an original pilot for UKTV through the female writers initiative with Comedy 50:50. On stage, Deborah is currently in development on a musical called The Breathe Project. She also wrote Big Sister, a one-woman show about her sister’s 75lb weight loss. This show won the Cultchivating the Fringe Award and was nominated for Outstanding Original Script at the 2020 Jessie Richardson Awards. She wrote the book for the sold-out production Sylvia’s Hotel, and her musical Carry On was awarded Pick of the Fringe in 2016. Additional writing credits include Little Sausage (The Other Palace), BUSK (Upstart Theatre), and Finding FaceTime (Touchstone Theatre).
As a dramaturg, she has worked with dozens of writers, comedians, and companies. Most recently, she co-founded Chalk Musical Theatre Dramaturgy, a script consultancy specifically for new musicals and was a Bill Millerd Artist Fund recipient for comedy dramaturgy. Past production dramaturgy credits include Dark Sisters (Vancouver Opera), Sweeney Todd (Vancouver Opera) and Saint Joan (Arts Club Theatre Company).
Deborah won an Early Career Dramaturg Travel Grant to attend the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas conference in New York in 2015. She completed a dramaturgy internship at the Arts Club Theatre Company and a scripted development mentorship at Omnifilm Entertainment. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and a Masters of Writing for Performance and Dramaturgy at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Deborah was selected as one of six participants in the 2025 Pacific Screenwriting Program’s Scripted Series Lab where she will develop an original series concept for television. She has a series in development with Screen Siren Pictures, and recently worked in the room for the series 1874.
She is from Vancouver, BC, a city that gave her a deep love of the ocean and unrealistic expectations about the affordability of sushi. When she isn’t writing, she’s eating cheap vegan food, drinking expensive coffee, or walking by the nearest body of water.
