Zoe Flood

BA Modern History & Politics 2002
Journalist and Filmmaker

Zoe Flood is an independent journalist and filmmaker working internationally, with a focus on human rights and the consequences of conflict.

Previously based in Nairobi for ten years, Zoe has reported for media including the BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, NYT, FT, Huffington Post, CNN, Channel 4, Sky News and National Geographic. She has covered major news events such as the overthrow of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya, and now writes features and directs long-form investigations.

Zoe recently shot, produced and directed several documentaries for the BBC’s international investigative unit—‘Africa: Battle for the Ballot Box’ on post-apartheid South Africa and democracy across the continent, the award-winning ‘Breaking the Silence’ on abortion rights in Kenya, and ‘Gamblers Like Me’ (Best Documentary nominee, British Sports Journalism Awards) on the explosion of sports betting across Africa.

She was edit producer and lead archive producer on ‘9/11: Inside the President’s War Room’, a multi-award-winning BBC/AppleTV+ film released to mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks (awards included BAFTA for Editing: Factual). As a writer, her long read on the scientists in Botswana who first sequenced Omicron won ‘Feature of the Year’ at the 2022 British Association of Science Writers Awards.

Living and learning at Keble confirmed that, in a world filled with confrontation, people do much better together. Zoe’s joint honours degree gave her the scope to lay the intellectual foundations for her career, from researching decolonisation and geopolitics to writing a thesis on Zimbabwe’s liberation war. Zoe also edited The Oxford Student, the Oxford Handbook and the Oxford and Cambridge Careers Guide, co-founded the Oxford Media Society and the Oxford Forum magazine, and deputy edited Isis. She served as Keble’s JCR Vice-President, regularly coxed for KCBC and met lifelong friends—and apparently slept very little.