Ann Druyan

TPMA Honorary Board Member

Ann Druyan is an Emmy and Peabody awards-winning author, lecturer, and television and motion picture writer/producer/director whose work is largely concerned with the effects of science and technology on our civilization.

Ann is perhaps most well-known for co-writing, with her late husband, Carl Sagan, the original Emmy Award and Peabody Award-winning TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), which currently holds the title of the most watched PBS science series in television history. The duo also co-wrote six New York Times best-sellers, including Comet, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon Haunted World, Billions & Billions, and The Varieties of Scientific Experience. Additionally, Ann was co-creator and co-producer of the Warner Bros. feature film Contact (1997) starring Jodie Foster and directed by Bob Zemeckis.

Ann was the lead executive producer, co-writer and a director of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, for which she won the Peabody, Producers Guild, and Emmy awards in 2014. The show, which received 13 Emmy nominations, was seen in 181 countries and by more than 135 million people worldwide. Her third season, entitled Cosmos: Possible Worlds, also broadcast on Fox and National Geographic, premiered in March, 2020. Like its predecessors, the show was helmed under Ann’s leadership as executive producer, writer, director, and creator. She wrote the show’s companion book, published by National Geographic.

Ann served as Creative Director of the NASA Voyager Interstellar Record Project to design a complex message, including music and images, for possible alien civilizations. These golden phonograph records affixed to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts, are now the most distant objects ever touched by human hands. They have a projected shelf life of one to five billion years and are expected to make several circumnavigations of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Ann is a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims for the Paranormal (CSICOP). In 2018 she was chosen Harvard Humanist of the Year.