Penny Woolcock is a writer director of television documentaries, television dramas, theatrical feature films and opera. Her fiction films are rooted in ethnographic research. Tina Goes Shopping and Tina Takes a Break were street cast on estates in Leeds and based on research about the culture and economy of life in marginal estates among excluded and impoverished communities. Mischief Night was a feature film to complete the Tina trilogy and also included the Pakistani Asian Community in Beeston. Her other feature films are The Principles of Lust, the John Adams opera The Death of Klinghoffer and Exodus, a contemporary retelling of the Old Testament story. Her film 1 Day, a hip hop musical about a day in the life of a young black street hustler was released this November and banned by the police.

She debuted as an opera director on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2008 with John Adams' Doctor Atomic which was shown successfully at the English National Opera this year.
She is currently shooting an observational documentary about homeless people in London On the Streets, preparing The Pearl Fishers opera for the English National Opera, has two scripts in development and is in the early stages of a multi-disciplinary project on the South Bank. She has a particular interest in life on the margins and both classical and hardcore urban music.

He writes occasionally for the broadsheets. He published One in Three: a son's journey into the history and science of cancer (Profile Books 2006, and 8 foreign publishers), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Award.