Deborah Schildt has worked in the film industry since graduating with honors from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1982. After completing her BFA degree, she spent another year doing graduate studies in film. She taught fine art for two years at a private arts school for children in Vancouver. While in British Columbia she wrote, shot, and edited, A Sense of Loss, an award winning 16mm documentary film broadcast by CBC nationally across Canada.

In 1983, Deborah moved to Los Angeles and began a career in freelance film production spending the next eight years working on feature films, television series and commercial productions. Her feature film credits include twenty films as an Art Director, Casting Director, Production Coordinator, Property Master and Set Designer in Los Angeles and across the United States.

Deborah has worked on over one hundred international and national television commercial productions as an Art Director, Asst. Director, Casting Director, Location Scout, Producer, Production Designer and Production Manager. She is a member of the I.A.T.S.E. Art Directors Union, Los Angeles local. She is a founding member of The Alaska Film Group, a non-profit trade association of film and video professionals in Alaska , serving in the past as their President and Vice President. She has worked throughout the U.S. and Canada and on productions in Cuba, China, Europe, Jamaica, Mongolia and Siberia.

Deborah’s passion is documentary filmmaking. She has filmed extensively in remote Alaska and Canada on her own projects. She recently completed “Boodog: How to Roast a Mongolian Marmot”, a short documentary that Deborah directed, shot, wrote and edited. The film premiered in May of 2006 at Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, Colorado and was selected for Mountainfilm on Tour  2006-08. It has screened at film festivals nationally and internationally and won the best short film award at the Flagstaff Iinternational Film Festival in the summer of 2007.

Her footage has also appeared in a program on indigenous rights that aired on BBC in 2000, in a program by the National Wildlife Federation in 2001, on The Discovery Channel for programs in the United States and New Zealand in 2003 and in “Maximum Bear”, a documentary for television by National Geographic that aired in August of 2006.

She is a Director for the production group Storyknife, who has  received grants from the Wolf Aviation Fund and the Alaska Humanities  for a documentary work in progress, Favorable Winds, about nature of knowledge for native pilots flying in bush Alaska.

Additional works in progress include; Bears of Katmai, a documentary on the Brown bears of Alasaka’s  Katmai reserve. Her wildlife photography has been published in an article for the Anchorage Daily News and in Alaska Magazine.