ABOUT DEBORAH J. FRYER

DEBORAH J. FRYER is the founder of Lila Films, Inc., an independent production company that crafts engaging, entertaining and educational videos and documentary films. Since Deborah began filmmaking in 1994, she has worn almost every hat in the business: she has written, produced, directed, researched, shot, edited, negotiated usage rights, and/or budgeted nearly 200 documentaries and educational videos covering the environment, history, science, medicine, health care, energy, archaeology and anthropology. She has worked on projects for NOVA, Frontline, PBS, History Channel, Discovery Channel, Travel Channel, HGTV, Turner Broadcasting, American Experience, MSNBC, Free Speech TV, Warren Miller Films, National Audubon Society, the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, InJoy Video Productions, Harvard University, and Films for the Humanities and Sciences.

Deborah’s first independent documentary project, SHAKEN: Journey Into the Mind of a Parkinson's Patient, has won numerous awards and accolades from film and medical communities around the world.

Deborah Fryer has also garnered much recognition for her creative nonfiction writing, which has been published by Travelers' Tales in The Best Women's Travel Writing 2006, The Best Travel Writing 2005, and excerpted in Her Fork in the Road and The World Is a Kitchen, two anthologies about women, food and travel.  She has also published essays with online literary magazines The King's English, Nights Publications (a travel magazine about the Caribbean), and Siemens: Sunscape (a magazine about solar energy). Deborah Fryer won the Moondance International Film Festival Short Story Award in 2004 and 2005, and received an Honorable Mention in 2004 and 2005 from New Millennium Writings, a literary journal which called Deborah “one of the 20 up-and-coming writers in the U.S. to watch.”

Deborah received her B.A. in Classics and Art History from Oberlin College in 1984, earned an M.A. in Latin at Columbia University in 1986, and went on to complete a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Classics at Princeton University in 1993. She speaks several languages and has lived, traveled and worked in 37 countries.  As a complement to her academic and professional pursuits, Deborah is a certified yoga teacher, tournament Scrabble player, and has completed nine marathons.

Lila is the Sanskrit word for play or dance. It describes the constant tension between concealing and revealing, shadow and substance. It is the continuous movement between light and darkness, joy and sorrow, and the inevitable circle of life and death.  Lila represents the interconnectedness of all things.  This is the essence of Lila Films.