Deanne Criswell served as the 12th Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 2021 to 2025. The Senate confirmed her unanimously on April 22, 2021, making her the first woman confirmed to lead the agency. Her tenure covered the federal response to hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding across the country, as well as FEMA's coordination of COVID-19 vaccination efforts in 2021.

She brings 30 years of emergency management experience across all levels of government. From 2019 to 2021, she served as Commissioner of New York City Emergency Management, the first woman to hold the role, where she led coordination of the city's COVID-19 response, as well as its response to heat emergencies, snowstorms, large fires, and the July 2019 power outages in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Before New York, she spent six years at FEMA, leading one of the agency's National Incident Management Assistance Teams and serving as a Federal Coordinating Officer on disasters that included flooding in North Dakota, hurricanes in South Carolina, and fires in Colorado. Earlier, she ran the Office of Emergency Management for the City of Aurora, Colorado, and spent two years as an executive in private-sector emergency management consulting.

Deanne served 21 years in the Colorado Air National Guard as a firefighter and Deputy Fire Chief, retiring as a Senior Master Sergeant. She deployed to Kuwait as a fire officer immediately after the September 11 attacks and to Qatar in 2010, where she advised senior leadership on fire protection requirements for bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Most recently, she was a Senior Fellow at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs, where she taught a graduate course on crisis leadership, emergency management, and national resilience.

She holds a Bachelor of Science from Colorado State University, a Master of Public Administration from the University of Colorado Denver, and a Master of Arts in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

At BES, Deanne works directly with client agencies as they build and test readiness, pressure-test plans against the incidents they're most likely to face, and make decisions under the conditions an activation creates. She joins Craig Fugate, Jim Featherstone, and Chris Vaughan on the BES Emergency Management Executive Consulting Team.