Alumni Webinar with Deborah Riley (Bachelor of Design Studies 1991), four-time Emmy Award-Winning production designer and art director.

Watch the first installment of our Semester 2 online Architecture Alumni Talk series featuring Deborah Riley (Bachelor of Design Studies 1991), four-time Emmy Award-Winning production designer and art director.

Her portfolio encompasses a world of award-winning film and television sets including Game of Thrones, Moulin Rouge! and The Matrix, as well as the closing ceremony for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

Watch UQ Architecture Alumni Talk Series: Deborah Riley, Production Designer on Game of Thrones

About Deborah Riley

Starting her design studies as an architecture student at The University of Queensland in 1991 and going on to complete a stage design degree at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Deborah Riley moved relatively quickly into the art department of film. 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), which was filmed in Tennessee and New Mexico. 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, but it was not until 2013 that the move truly paid off. It was then that she was hired as the production designer for the fourth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones.

She earned four consecutive Emmy Awards and three Art Directors Guild Awards and a BAFTA for her work on the epic medieval fantasy.