Specialties and Skills

  • Directing and field producing

  • Visual storytelling and story development

  • Interviewing and research

  • Long- and short-form documentary, news, and broadcast production

  • Editing and packaging programs, features, news reports, and interviews

  • Communications, social media, digital marketing, and public relations

  • Press releases and social copy; content editing

  • Managing multiple projects at once

  • Identifying high-quality programming

About DENIZ

I'm a National Murrow Award-winning story producer and multimedia journalist with advanced research and reporting skills and extensive experience in all phases of long- and short-form documentary, news, and broadcast production. I specialize in taking an idea from pitch to published across all platforms, and I'm comfortable in the field, the studio, and the editing bay. I'm especially adept at telling visual stories in beautiful, modern ways.

I have excellent technical, research, and writing skills and a proven ability to edit and package a wide variety of programs, publications, features, news reports, and interviews. I'm also well-versed in communications, social media, digital marketing, and public relations.

My goal as a journalist is to find and tell stories that don't waste an audience's time, and to produce content that wrangles, demands, and sustains the attention of even the most easily distracted viewer. When I put a story together, I thrive on using my creative instincts to invent and design manifold ways of reaching audiences. (See, Mom? Art school totally paid off.)

My favorite stories are the ones that, after relentless research and preparation, take a whole new direction than I could have predicted, making a mockery of my initial pitch.

I was born an information freak. For my eighth birthday I got the 15-volume ChildCraft encyclopedia set, and it's still the best gift I've ever received. I'm naturally curious, and I've always wanted to ask questions because I'm interested in what people carry around inside of them. I'm a student of the news and a student of events. You have to be a good student to ask a good question.

For some reason, people have been telling me things my whole life: personal stories I didn't ask for, didn't need, and sometimes didn't want to know. When I was younger, I hated it. Keeping secrets in high school was hard enough without Stacey Wilson telling me she was cheating on her boyfriend with his younger sister. (Don't tell anyone I told you.) As I grew up, the stakes got higher and the stories got much more interesting. I learned how to actually listen, when to ask questions, and how to find stories by following leads instead of waiting for people to come to me.

I keep an Evernote notebook called "Idea Dump" with more than 1,500 story ideas. It's a resource for future stories, and a reminder of how much information people are bombarded with every day and how important it is to tell stories that are truly worth their time.

Nothing makes me happier than a meaningful conversation or an informative debate where each person walks away knowing more than they did when it started. And also talking about smutty romance books of all kinds.