Ann Druyan

Ann Druyan (born June 13, 1949) is an Emmy Award-winning American writer and Peabody Award-winning producer specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

She was the Creative Director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project, the golden discs affixed to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft.

Druyan was born on June 13, 1949, in Queens, New York, the daughter of Pearl A. (née Goldsmith) and Harry Druyan, who co-owned a knitware firm.

Druyan's first novel, A Famous Broken Heart, was published in 1977.

Druyan co-wrote six New York Times best-sellers with Carl Sagan, including: Comet, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and The Demon-Haunted World. She is co-author, along with Carl Sagan, F. D. Drake, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg and Linda Salzman Sagan, of Murmurs Of Earth : The Voyager Interstellar Record. She also wrote the updated introduction to Sagan's book The Cosmic Connection, and the epilogue of Billions and Billions. She edited and wrote the introduction to a book of Sagan's 1985 Gifford lectures, The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

As creative director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project, Druyan worked with a team to design a complex message, including music and images, for possible alien civilizations. These golden phonograph records affixed to the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are now beyond the outermost planets of the solar system and Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space. Both records have a projected shelf life of one billion years.

Druyan is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims for the Paranormal (CSICOP).

Druyan served as program director of the first solar sail deep space mission, Cosmos 1, launched on a Russian ICBM in 2005.

Druyan is involved in multiple Breakthrough Initiatives. With Frank Drake, Druyan is the co-chair of Breakthrough Message, and she is also a member of Breakthrough Starshot.

She is a member of the advisory board of The Carl Sagan Institute.

Druyan wrote and produced the 1987 PBS NOVA episode Confessions of a Weaponeer on the life of President Eisenhower's Science Advisor, George Kistiakowsky.

In 2000, Druyan co-founded Cosmos Studios, Inc, with Joseph Firmage. As CEO of Cosmos Studios, Druyan produces science-based entertainment for all media. In addition to Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, Cosmos Studios has produced Cosmic Africa, Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, and the Emmy-nominated documentary Cosmic Journey: The Voyager Interstellar Mission and Message.

Druyan was one of the three writers of the TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, along with Carl Sagan and Steven Soter, and a producer for the 1997 motion picture Contact starring Jena Malone, David Morse, and Jodie Foster.

Druyan is the chief executive officer and the co-founder of Cosmos Studios. In 2009, she distributed a series of podcasts called At Home in the Cosmos with Annie Druyan, in which she described her works, the life of her husband, Carl Sagan, and their marriage.

In 2011, it was announced that Druyan would be part of the writing and production teams for a sequel to Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, to be called Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which began airing in March 2014. Episodes premiered on Fox and also aired on National Geographic Channel on the same night.

In March 2020, a third season of Cosmos, named Cosmos: Possible Worlds premiered on National Geographic. She was the executive producer, writer, and director of the series. Druyan also said: "I very much have season four in mind, and I know what it’s going to be. And I even know some of the stories that I want to tell in it."

Druyan has served on the Board of Directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) for over 10 years and was president from 2006 to 2010.

In November 2006, Druyan was a speaker at "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival".

In January 2007, she was a juror at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, responsible for selecting the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for films about science and technology.

In an interview with Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post, Druyan stated that her early interest in science stemmed from a fascination with Karl Marx. Achenbach commented that "She had, at the time, rather vaporous standards of evidence," a reference to her belief in the ancient astronauts of Erich von Däniken and the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky pertaining to the Solar System. Druyan freely acknowledged her past views and also said that they changed dramatically after marrying Carl Sagan.

In 2020, Sagan and Druyan's daughter Sasha Sagan released a book For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in our Unlikely World, which discusses life with her parents and her father's death when she was fourteen years old.

Druyan also gave Sasha a recurring role in Cosmos: Possible Worlds, where she played her own grandmother, including in the episode Man of a Trillion Worlds, which featured the life of Carl Sagan.

• 2004 Richard Dawkins Award
• 2014 Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming Primetime Emmy Award
• 2015 The Award for Outstanding Producer of Non-Fiction Television from Producers Guild of America
• 2015 Writers Guild Award for "Documentary Script - Other than Current Events"
• 2017 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award
• 2020 National Geographic Further Award