Stacey Dooley is a British television presenter, investigative journalist and author from Luton who is best known for the BBC documentary strand Stacey Dooley Investigates. As of October 2026, she is 39 years old. She won Strictly Come Dancing series 16 in 2018 with professional dancer Kevin Clifton, who later became her partner, and she was appointed MBE in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting, according to reporting of the honours list by Radio Times.
At a Glance
- Full name: Stacey Jaclyn Dooley
- Born: 9 March 1987, Luton, Bedfordshire, England
- Age: 39 as of October 2026
- Nationality: British
- Occupation: Television presenter, investigative journalist, documentary maker and author
- Best known for: Stacey Dooley Investigates, Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts, winning Strictly Come Dancing in 2018, Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over and DNA Family Secrets
- Partner: Kevin Clifton, as publicly reported since 2019
- Children: One daughter, Minnie, born in January 2023, as reported by reputable outlets including Hello! magazine
- Honour: MBE, appointed in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting
Who Is Stacey Dooley?
Stacey Dooley is one of the BBC’s most recognisable factual presenters. For almost two decades she has fronted social-issue documentaries for BBC Three, BBC One and BBC Two, covering child labour, sex trafficking, domestic abuse, mental health, extremism and the environmental cost of fast fashion.
What sets Dooley apart is her route in: no journalism degree, no broadcasting training and no industry contacts — she was working in retail in Luton. The Grierson Trust, announcing her 2024 Trustees’ Award, noted that background and named her the youngest person ever to receive it. Her direct style became her signature: plain questions, and centring the people living the story.
Where Was Stacey Dooley Born and How Did She Grow Up?
Stacey Jaclyn Dooley was born on 9 March 1987 in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. She grew up in Luton and attended Stopsley High School.
As reported in profiles drawing on Dooley’s own interviews, she left school at 15 and worked in a hair salon in Bramingham and as a shop assistant selling perfume at Luton Airport — the job she was doing when television found her. She has spoken about being raised largely by her mother, Diane, after her father left when she was very young. More detailed private family claims on aggregator sites are not repeated here, as they are not consistently verified in reputable reporting.
Her Luton upbringing shaped the questions she later asked on camera about low pay, insecure work and exploitation — subjects she had lived alongside before reporting on them abroad.
How Did Stacey Dooley Get Started on Television?
Dooley’s break came through Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts, a BBC Three documentary series broadcast from 22 April to 13 May 2008.
The format took six young British fashion consumers, aged 20 to 24, to India to live and work alongside garment workers making clothes for British high streets. Dooley was one of the participants — selected, in effect, to represent the fashion-obsessed shopper the programme wanted to challenge.
Accounts of how she applied differ in small detail. The widely reported version, repeated in BBC-linked profiles and in a history published by the Girl Museum, is that a leaflet or advert for participants reached her at home in 2007, while she was working at Luton Airport. What is not in dispute is the sequence after the series aired: Dooley’s reaction to the child labour she saw in India, and her campaigning on her return, drew wider media attention, including an appearance on BBC Two’s Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, and BBC Three then commissioned her to front her own films.
Dooley did not win a presenting job in 2008. She was a contributor who was noticed, and the presenting commission followed in 2009.
Her own Strictly chapter would come a decade later, in the same ballroom that more recently made a record-breaking semi-finalist of EastEnders star Balvinder Sopal.
What Is Stacey Dooley Investigates?
Stacey Dooley Investigates began in 2009 with a two-part special on child labour, often listed as Kids with Machetes and Kids for Sale. It became the umbrella title for Dooley’s BBC Three investigations for more than a decade.
Early films included former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and sex trafficking in Cambodia in 2010. In 2011, Tourism and the Truth examined tourism’s impact in Thailand and Kenya. In 2012, My Hometown Fanatics took her back to Luton to examine extremism. Later work widened the risk: Iraq and Syria, Florida and Russia, and migration across Europe. Stacey Dooley: Face to Face with ISIS won the Popular Features Award at the One World Media Awards in 2018, as recorded by the Grierson Trust and Penguin Books.
The Grierson Trust states that Dooley has made more than 100 documentaries since 2008. That figure — more than 100 films, attributed here to the Grierson Trust’s 2024 announcement — is the safest measure of the scale of her output as of October 2026, rather than the smaller and often outdated totals of 50 or 70 films repeated on older biography pages.
Did Stacey Dooley Win Strictly Come Dancing?
Yes. Stacey Dooley won series 16 of Strictly Come Dancing on BBC One on 15 December 2018, partnered by professional dancer Kevin Clifton.
Announced as a contestant on 16 August 2018, she reached the final against Joe Sugg, Faye Tozer and Ashley Roberts. Grazia and Grimsby Live both record that Dooley and Clifton finished fourth on the judges’ leaderboard, with 114 points out of 120, and won on the public vote. It was Clifton’s first win, at his fifth final — and it made Dooley a mainstream entertainment name beyond BBC Three audiences.
What Else Has Stacey Dooley Presented?
Glow Up: Britain’s Next Make-Up Star
From 2019 to 2020, Dooley presented the first two series of BBC Three’s Glow Up: Britain’s Next Make-Up Star, working with judges Val Garland and Dominic Skinner. In October 2020 she announced she would not return for series three, citing scheduling conflicts, and on 14 January 2021 the BBC announced Maya Jama as the new host, as recorded in the programme’s production history and reported by Radio Times. Dooley is therefore the original host of Glow Up, not its current host as of October 2026.
Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over
Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over, which began in 2019 on the channel then known as W and now as U, reversed her usual format: instead of travelling to a conflict zone, she stays for 72 hours in the home of a British family with an unusual life. A US version, Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over USA, followed from 2023. As reported in September 2025 by BANG Showbiz via major outlets, a sixth series on U was airing in autumn 2025 — making it, as of October 2026, one of her longest-running non-BBC formats.
DNA Family Secrets
From 2021, Dooley co-presented BBC Two’s DNA Family Secrets with geneticist Professor Turi King. The series helps people investigate ancestry, missing relatives and inherited genetic conditions using DNA testing. It showed a different register from her investigations: slower, domestic and often focused on older contributors discovering who their parents really were.
Other presenting work
Her broader BBC work includes This Is My House, CBBC’s The Nine to Five with Stacey Dooley, and one-offs including Inside the Convent (2022), Stalkers (2022) and Inside the Undertakers (2023).
What Books Has Stacey Dooley Written?
Dooley is a three-time Sunday Times bestselling author, according to Penguin Books, her publisher.
Her debut, On the Front Line with the Women Who Fight Back, was published in February 2018 and drew on women she had met while filming — survivors of trafficking, domestic violence and war. Her second book, Are You Really OK?: Understanding Britain’s Mental Health Emergency, followed her BBC documentaries on young people’s mental health; Penguin and BBC Books list it with a 2022 publication and a 2023 edition. Her third book, Dear Minnie: Conversations with Remarkable Mothers, was published on 13 March 2025, as listed by booksellers from Penguin’s edition data. Written after the birth of her own daughter, it is built around letters and conversations with mothers in very different circumstances, as described on Penguin Books’ author page for Stacey Dooley.
Has Stacey Dooley Acted on Stage?
Yes. Dooley made her stage debut as Jenny in Danny Robins’s supernatural thriller 2:22 A Ghost Story at the Gielgud Theatre in London’s West End in May 2024, playing the role until August 2024.
She returned to the part on tour with Kevin Clifton as Sam in the 2025 UK tour, which opened at Manchester Opera House on 4 August 2025 and ran in their casting until 29 November 2025 — billed as the first time a real-life couple had played Jenny and Sam. As of October 2026, she is not in the announced casting for the tour’s 2026 leg.
What Honours and Awards Has Stacey Dooley Received?
Dooley was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting. That wording — for services to broadcasting — and the 2018 Birthday Honours list are the verified facts, reported at the time by Radio Times in its honours coverage and repeated consistently by Penguin Books and the BBC’s partner organisations.
Her other major documentary honours include:
- One World Media Award, Popular Features, 2018 — for Stacey Dooley: Face to Face with ISIS.
- Grierson Trustees’ Award, 2024 — given by The Grierson Trust for outstanding contribution to the art and craft of documentary. The Trust states she is the youngest person to receive the Trustees’ Award. Full details are on The Grierson Trust’s 2024 Trustees’ Award announcement.
Who Is Stacey Dooley’s Partner, and Does She Have Children?
Dooley’s partner is Kevin Clifton, the former Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer with whom she won the show in 2018. Reputable outlets, including Hello! magazine’s reporting of the couple’s own announcements, report that they have been in a relationship since early 2019. They are consistently described in reputable reporting as partners, not as a married couple, and this article follows that wording.
In August 2022, Dooley announced on her own social media that she and Clifton were expecting their first child. Their daughter, Minnie, was born in January 2023 — reported by Hello! as 10 January 2023 — and the couple have since shared occasional family updates while choosing not to show their daughter’s face publicly, as reported by Hello! and Edinburgh Live.
In a September 2025 episode of Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over, reported by BANG Showbiz and Woman & Home, Dooley spoke on camera, in her own words, about an ectopic pregnancy the previous year that required emergency surgery after an internal rupture, and about thinking through other options for growing her family. Because that disclosure was made by Dooley herself, on her own programme, it is reported here briefly and attributed — this profile carries no other health information about her.
What Is Stacey Dooley Doing in 2025 and 2026?
As of October 2026, Dooley remains an active BBC documentary maker, and 2025–2026 has been one of her busiest periods since Strictly.
In March 2025, BBC Three broadcast Stacey Dooley: Rape on Trial, a two-part film made over three years following women who had reported rape by someone they knew through long court delays, as described by production company Minnow Films. The same run included Meet the Shoplifters and Growing Up Gypsy. Dear Minnie was published that month, and from August to November 2025 she toured in 2:22 A Ghost Story with Clifton.
In 2026, Northern Ireland Screen announced in May that filming had begun on Stacey Dooley Cleans Up (working title), a 12-part BBC Daytime and BBC Northern Ireland series about community litter clear-ups. In June 2026, the BBC announced three new BBC Three documentaries, reported by Televisual and Prolific North: Death in the Barracks, about the death of Royal Artillery Gunner Jaysley Beck at Larkhill Camp; Fallen Women, about British women who died after falls from height and whether domestic abuse was overlooked; and Down the K-Hole, filmed over five months in a Stockport rehabilitation unit examining ketamine addiction. Fallen Women was scheduled on BBC Three in mid-October 2026. Her six-part BBC One series Clickbait Clinic with Stacey Dooley, testing viral health claims with medical experts, was announced in September 2025 for 2026.
What Is Stacey Dooley’s Net Worth?
No verified figure is published here. Dooley’s net worth is not disclosed in any official filing, BBC statement or reputable interview that this research could verify. Websites that list a precise figure for her — and they disagree with each other by millions of pounds and dollars — are aggregator estimates with no stated source or method. As of October 2026, readers should treat any single net-worth number attached to Stacey Dooley’s name as unverified.
What can be said on the record is narrower: she has worked continuously for the BBC since 2008, has published three bestselling books, and has completed a West End run and a national tour — but that is not a basis for inventing a number.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is Stacey Dooley?
Stacey Dooley is 39 years old as of October 2026. She was born on 9 March 1987 in Luton, Bedfordshire, so she turned 39 in March 2026 and will turn 40 in March 2027.
Did Stacey Dooley win Strictly Come Dancing?
Yes. She won series 16 of Strictly Come Dancing on 15 December 2018 with professional partner Kevin Clifton. They finished fourth with the judges in the final and won on the public vote.
Who is Stacey Dooley’s partner?
Her partner is Kevin Clifton, her Strictly dance partner from 2018. Reputable outlets report they have been in a relationship since early 2019. They are described as partners, not as a married couple.
Does Stacey Dooley have a daughter?
Yes. Dooley and Kevin Clifton have one daughter, Minnie, born in January 2023, as reported by Hello! magazine and other reputable outlets from the couple’s own announcement.
Does Stacey Dooley have an MBE?
Yes. She was appointed MBE in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting. In 2024 she also received the Grierson Trustees’ Award for outstanding contribution to documentary, and The Grierson Trust states she is its youngest recipient.
What is Stacey Dooley doing now?
As of October 2026, she is fronting new BBC documentaries announced in 2026 — Fallen Women, Death in the Barracks and Down the K-Hole for BBC Three — alongside the BBC One series Clickbait Clinic with Stacey Dooley and the BBC Daytime series Stacey Dooley Cleans Up, which began filming in May 2026.
