Hedayat began her career with the BBC, presenting and reporting on current affairs documentaries for
BBC Three, CBBC
Newsround and Channel 4. Her early works include
Women, Weddings, War and Me (2010),
Music, Money & Hip Hop Honeys (2011) and
Riots and Revolutions: My Arab Spring Journey (2012). She later reported on international documentaries such as
The Children of Kabul: An Uncertain Future (2014),
Vietnam’s Dog Snatchers (2014) and
Vaccination Wars (2015). In 2016, she presented
The Traffickers, an eight-part investigative series for Fusion TV, Netflix and Fremantle Media, which explored global smuggling networks and won Journalist of the Year and Best Investigation at the British Asian Media Awards. For her work on the series, she won the 2017 Reporter/Correspondent
Gracie Award (presented by the
Alliance for Women in Media), and was named Journalist of the Year at the Asian Media Awards. She went on to host
Food Exposed with Nelufar Hedayat (2018), an environmental and food documentary series, before presenting
Flash Forward (Rakuten, 2021), a science and technology docuseries. From 2020 to 2025 she executive produced and hosted
Generation C: Rising Up in a Changed World, a four-part series examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people. Her subsequent work with Scripps International included producing and directing
The God Thieves (2022), which investigated the illicit trade in cultural artifacts, and
Plastic Time Bomb (2023), a science documentary that won the National News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Science, Technology or Environmental Coverage. She also co-directed
Culture’s Climate Crisis (2024), filmed across Tanzania and Alaska, and
Museum on Fire (2025) for PBS and Scripps, which documented threats to UNESCO world heritage sites. In 2025, she produced
Binni’s Blades, an observational documentary set in Birmingham, and began working as a Development Producer for Firecrest Films and Channel 4. ==Awards==