Denise Zmekhol is an Arab-Brazilian award-winning producer and director of documentary films and media projects that span the globe. Zmekhol’s work addresses cultural preservation and environmental stewardship and how these issues intersect with technological innovation. Her documentary films, commercials and innovative transmedia projects have been recognized for their elegant visual style and deft storytelling.

Her feature documentary Children of the Amazon (2008)  was supported by the Independent Television Service and broadcast on PBS, as well as on European and Latin American television. The film won multiple awards at film festivals around the world. Through captivating photos and interviews, Children of the Amazon tells the story of struggle and hope to protect the world’s largest tropical rainforest and its inhabitants. The film follows Zmekhol as she travels a modern highway deep into the Amazon in search of the indigenous Surui and Negarote children she photographed fifteen years earlier. Part road movie, part time travel, her journey tells the story of what happened to life in the largest forest on earth when a road was built straight through its heart.

Projects produced with Google Earth include, Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops (2013) which documents efforts of indigenous Amazonian tribes to map their land as a means of preserving their cultural traditions and protecting their forests from illegal logging, and From the Ground to the Cloud: Transforming Chimpanzee Conservation with High-tech Tools (2013), produced in conjunction with the Jane Goodall Institute.

Zmekhol co-directed Bridge to the Future ( a short for PBS/TED Talks: Science and Wonder and was co-producer on Amir Soltani and Chihiro Wimbush’s Dogtown Redemption (2016), a film about poverty and recyclers in West Oakland that was exhibited on the PBS series Independent Lens.

As director/producer of Skin of Glass, Denise Zmekhol was the recipient of ITVS, the National Endowment for the Arts, IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund, Latino Public Broadcasting, the Berkeley Film Foundation Al Bendich Award and several private foundations.

In 2019, Zmekhol was included in a list of 15 Bay Area Filmmakers to Watch. She presented the story of SKIN OF GLASS at the Pop-Up Magazine Spring 2019 tour in seven cities along with women from around the world at the TEDWomen BOLD + BRILLIANT conference. In 2021, Zmekhol received a BAVC Media Fellowship, attended the Logan Nonfiction Program and was invited to participate at DOC NYC Only in New York industry meetings.

A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Zmekhol is fluent in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French and has worked on projects in Brazil, Europe, Africa, Asia and the United States.