Deanna was born and raised in Yellowknife, NWT, Canada. For the last 25 years, she has been studying and working with marine mammals around the world in locations ranging from Vancouver Island, Stellwagen Bank off the Coast of Massachusetts, to Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, Iceland, Northern Europe, Svalbard, and Antarctica. She attended graduate school at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and the Arctic University of Norway.

Deanna has spent a decade working as a biologist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada in the Canadian Arctic and the last 7 years as a researcher for the Institute of Marine Research in Norway. She is most passionate about ecosystems, how they function and how species interact, and especially how that is all changing in the Arctic. A key focus of her research in Norway is how southern species might be competing with endemic Arctic species. She leads a research vessel in the Norwegian Arctic every summer to estimate the whale populations of north Atlantic from blue whales to killer whales and works with the International Whaling commission to sustainably manage Norway’s commercial whale hunt. In her free time she works as an expedition guide in the Arctic and Antarctic and takes adventures with her husband, Aaron and son, Mark, and intrepid little dog Fridtjof.(named after the one and only Fridtjof Nansen)