Dorothy Byrne

Dorothy Byrne was Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel Four until April 2020. She then became Editor at Large at Channel Four, a role that was specially created for her. She is a passionate feminist and is now President Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University while continuing to be an executive producer of international documentaries.

During her time at Channel Four, Dorothy was responsible for news and current affairs programmes which have had a national and global impact, winning numerous Royal Television Society, BAFTA and Emmy awards. 

Dorothy was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society for her ‘outstanding contribution to television’.  She also won the BBC Grierson Trustees Award for contribution to documentary at the British Documentary Awards; received the Outstanding Contribution Award at the Royal Television Society Journalism Awards; was awarded a BAFTA Scotland Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television; and won the Women in Film and Television Award for contribution to television. 

She was Executive Producer of Leaving Neverland, The Hunt for Jihadi John, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, The Ballymurphy Precedent, The Man Putin Couldn’t Kill, and Island of Secrets, a film about sex abuse in the Falklands. She has recently been Executive Producer of a three-part series about Ghislaine Maxwell and the two-Part series Spacey Unmasked. In 2019, Dorothy delivered the prestigious MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in which she criticised politicians for lying and failing to be held to account.  In 2023 she delivered the James Cameron Memorial Lecture.