Lucy Cooke

Lucy is a writer, filmmaker and TV presenter with a background in zoology. She loves stories about weird animals and wild places and has recently been awarded one of National Geographic’s coveted Emerging Explorer Awards.

Lucy studied zoology at Oxford under Richard Dawkins before moving into TV to work on cult comedy shows then documentaries. She’s written, produced and directed high profile, critically acclaimed documentaries of all lengths from EMMY nominated series for the BBC, to WEBBY award-winning online shorts for VBS and Academy Award nominated cinema feature documentaries.

Her most recent documentary, ‘Meet the Sloths’ about the world’s only sloth orphanage, aired internationally on Animal Planet (in the US under the title ‘Too Cute! Baby Sloths’). It was a massive ratings success and is one of the three finalists in the popular broadcast documentary category at the prestigious Panda awards this year’s Wildscreen Festival.

The documentary was commissioned after a series of videos Lucy produced about the sloth sanctuary went viral, racking up over 10 million views and celebrity fans such as Ashton Kutcher, Ricky Gervaise and Kristen Bell.




Lucy’s first book, ‘A Little book of sloth’, featuring her photos and funny stories about the world’s laziest animal, will be published by Simon and Schuster in March 2013.

Lucy is dedicated to raising awareness about some of life’s lesser known and under appreciated animals. She recently spent 6 months traveling alone around South America investigating the amphibian extinction crisis. The resulting irreverent blog, The Amphibian Avenger, has been read by hundreds of thousands of people and featured in newspapers across the globe including The Times, who described her as ‘an internet sensation’.




As a journalist Lucy has written features for various UK broadsheets including the Telegraph, Sunday Times magazine and the Guardian. She is also a regular on the festival and literary talk circuit in the UK with popular humorous talks on frogs, sloths, freaky animals and going viral using social media.

After years behind the camera, Lucy is making her debut as a presenter, hosting and co-producing her own series, Freaks and Creeps, for National Geographic Wild. The series is based on her own original idea, which sees Lucy travel to the furthest corners of the globe to save the animals that nobody loves: the freaks, the ugly and the overlooked. The first episode ‘Devil’s Island’ transmits on July 17th 2012 at 10pm.