Orla Doherty

Doherty's family comes from Donegal, Ireland.[1] She has a degree in chemistry.[2] She began working in television for DEF II, a part of BBC Two.[3] At 30 she tried scuba diving for the first time during a trip to Thailand, which made her move away at 31 to start studying coral reefs for a non-governmental organization, the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation.[4][3][2][5] She spent most of the next 10 years on a ship studying the reefs in the Pacific Ocean.[3] Upon her return, she began working for BBC's Natural History Unit, and in 2013 she joined the production team of BBC's Blue Planet II.[2] In 2018 she produced the documentary Oceans: Our Blue Planet.[2] That same year, she was named one of Vogue's Women Shaping 2018.[6] In 2019, she became co-executive producer on the documentary series Mission OceanX.[7]

Doherty worked as a producer for Blue Planet II for four years.[3] In total she spent two and a half years filming divided over 17 expeditions.[1] She produced The Deep episode, for which she spent 500 hours in a submarine under water, going as deep as 1000 meters.[2][8] She was one of the first people to go that deep in the Antarctic.[9] She was among the team that filmed a whale fall for the first time in the Atlantic Ocean.[8] She also co-produced the final episode of the series, named Our Blue Planet, which showed the effect of plastics and pollution on the ocean.[8] For this episode, she filmed scientists from all over the world.[10]