Anderson Cooper is the anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and host and executive producer of the daily one-hour talk show Anderson Live, where he brings his passionate voice and unique ability as a storyteller to daytime television.
Over the past 20 years, he has covered virtually every major news event around the world, including the 2012 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He has won numerous awards, including an Emmy and a Peabody, and captivated audiences with his courageous and compassionate on-the-scene reports of history -making events, including the recent revolution in Egypt, the earthquakes in both Japan and Haiti, and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a regular contributor to CBS’s 60 Minutes.
Cooper has reported multiple times from Afghanistan and Iraq, covering several anniversaries of the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraqi elections. During most of 2007 and 2008, Cooper traveled around the world for Planet in Peril, a high-definition documentary about issues threatening the planet, its inhabitants and its natural resources. In 2005, Cooper spent more than a month along the U.S. Gulf Coast covering the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and has returned many times since to follow the reconstruction progress. He anchored much of CNN’s live coverage of the funeral of Pope John Paul JI and traveled to Sri Lanka to cover the 2004 tsunami.
Before joining CNN, Cooper was an ABC News correspondent and host of the network’s reality program, The Mole. He anchored ABC’s live, interactive news and interview program World News Now, and provided reports for World News Tonight and 20/20 Downtown. Cooper joined ABC from Channel One News, where he served as chief international correspondent.
Cooper graduated from Yale College in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. He also studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.