Deborah Esquenazi
Deborah S. Esquenazi is a Peabody- and Critic's Choice award winning film director, screenwriter, and investigative journalist.
In late 2025, Deb will debut her new investigative doc, Night in West Texas, executive produced by Texas Monthly. Embedding once again in a multi-year investigation with the Innocence Project of Texas, her second feature tells the story of James Harry Reyos, a gay Apache oil engineer who was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1981 murder of a Catholic priest in West Texas.
Esquenazi's first feature, the critically acclaimed documentary Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, won the Critic’s Choice Award for 'Best First Feature', garnered her first Emmy nomination for 'Outstanding Social Issues Documentary', a Peabody Award, and won a GLAAD Media Award for 'Outstanding Documentary', among other distinctions. The film helped exonerate the ‘San Antonio Four’ and is mentioned in the opening passages of the Writs of Habeas Corpus in Ex Parte Anna Vasquez, Cassandra Rivera, Elizabeth Ramirez, and Kristie Mayhugh.
Her documentary short, El Vacio, produced by Concordia Studios/New York Times, was nominated for an Emmy as part of the series From Here to Home. She was a 2020 Sundance Momentum Fellow for her thriller, A Killing on Park, a fictional work inspired by one of her early criminal investigations.
She has also been a Sundance Screenwriting Intensive Fellow (2019), a 2022 Women @ Sundance fellow, a Sundance Documentary Film Fellow, a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow, and a Firelight Film Fellow.
She lives in Austin, Tx, with her wife and two sons.
