Lucy Littlewood

From presenting Premier League football to millions of viewers across Asia to transforming museums, raising more than £100 million for charitable causes and leading some of Britain’s best-known cultural organisations, Lucy’s career has been built around one central idea: great stories have the power to change how people think, feel and act.

Her media career began unusually early. While still at school she worked on local radio and television as a sports and news reporter — and her first television appearance came earlier still: aged 12, on Antiques Roadshow, proudly presenting a prototype flushing loo.

Working as a woman in sports broadcasting in the early 1990s put her at the forefront of a changing industry. There were few female role models, even fewer precedents and, at some football grounds, not even a ladies’ bathroom. As a nightly anchor for ESPN in Singapore, she and her co-presenter Bethan Evans were globally the most prominent female faces in sports television.

Returning to London, Lucy moved behind the camera and into culture — the National Trust, the Serpentine Galleries, Macmillan Cancer Support, the British Council, the Museum of the Home and St Martin-in-the-Fields — before becoming the sixth Director, and first British Director, of the American Museum & Gardens in Bath.

She believes museums’ next great opportunity is to build on their position as some of society’s most trusted institutions: becoming places that don’t simply tell communities’ stories, but give people the confidence and authority to tell their own.

Alongside her cultural leadership roles she chairs Jerusalem Productions and Four8 Media on behalf of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, and Turner’s House Trust in Twickenham. The sports obsession never disappeared: she remains an enthusiastic spectator of almost anything live, with particular loyalties to Fulham FC, Bath Rugby and Wimbledon.