Penny Woolcock is a writer and director of documentaries, television fiction, feature films and opera. Her documentaries started with When the Dog Bites (1988) about unemployment through to The Wet House (2000) about street drinkers. On the Streets  (2010) a documentary about homeless people shot over eight months on the streets of London will be transmitted on BBC4 later this year. Her fiction films are rooted in ethnographic research and mostly street cast. Macbeth on the Estate (1997) set Shakespeare on a council estate in Birmingham. Tina Goes Shopping (1999) and Tina Takes a Break (2000) were fictionalised accounts of the culture and economy of excluded and impoverished communities in Leeds. Mischief Night (2005) completed the Tina trilogy and also included the Pakistani community in Beeston.

Other films include The Principles of Lust, the John Adams opera The Death of Klinghoffer and Exodus, a contemporary retelling of the Old Testament story set in Margate and cast from the local community and asylum seekers. 1 Day (2009), was a hip hop musical about a young black street hustler cast in Birmingham. She has also directed Doctor Atomic (2008 – 2009) an opera about the Manhattan Project staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and at the English National Opera and Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (2010) also for The English National Opera.

She has a particular interest in working with communities who are estranged from mainstream culture.