Loredana Cunti
Still deciding what she wants to do when she grows up.
Professional Biography
Loredana Cunti is an author, speaker, producer, and cultural storyteller whose career bridges multicultural media, international film and television, children’s literature, and musical theatre.
She began her career as a DJ and Promotions Manager at CHIN Radio and TV and CIAO Radio before spending 25+ years in international film and television — as Head of Foreign Film Sales at Malofilm, launching children’s divisions at PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, and as Head of Children’s Programming for Universal Studios, producing animated series including Maisy Mouse, Pink Panther and Pals, and Sitting Ducks. Animation Magazine named her one of the Top 25 Women in Animation.
In 2002 she founded Loreworks Ltd., developing original intellectual property and consulting for Universal Studios, Weta Workshop, MGM, Fremantle Media, and Atlantyca Entertainment. She has served on the TIFF Industry Advisory Board, mentored at the Singapore and Ontario Media Development Corporations, and juried at Giffoni, Kidscreen, and Cartoons on the Bay.
Her 8 picture books have earned a Junior Library Guild Selection, multiple Forest of Reading nominations, a TD Summer Reading Club pick, a 2025 World Cookbook Award, and recognition from the Reuben Awards of the National Cartoonists Society. How Gogo Found Her Groove has been adopted into every elementary school in the Toronto Catholic District School Board and is currently in development for animation. She publishes under her own imprint, Loreworks Press.
She speaks at elementary classrooms, secondary schools, and women’s conferences on creativity, confidence, resilience, and the art of reconnecting with the kid inside. She has partnered with Girl Guides of Canada, the National Ballet School of Canada, Women in STEM initiatives, OISE, and StepStones for Youth.
She is currently writing and producing Neapolitan Ice Cream: The Musical — a three-person jukebox musical and love letter to the Italian immigrant experience.
Loredana Cunti is the founder of Loreworks Ltd. — a storytelling company developing original books, events, and musical theatre that build confidence in kids and inspire adults to stay curious. What connects every chapter of her career is not reinvention for its own sake but a genuine desire to keep adapting, keep learning, and follow curiosity wherever it leads.
The Early Days
Loredana Cunti grew up in an Italian immigrant family — the middle child between two brothers, born in Toronto and raised in the countryside of Kleinburg, Ontario. Her first language was the Neapolitan dialect. The first in her family to graduate from university.
There were no bedtime books in the Cunti household — but there were always stories of back home, of the journey over, of the life they were building and the one they had left behind.
Where many children’s authors cite a lifelong love of books, Loredana’s relationship with reading had a slower start. Her parents were still learning English themselves, so no one read her bedtime stories. She still remembers the first book that stopped her in her tracks: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by Maurice Sendak.
She was more social butterfly than bookworm, regularly getting into trouble for talking too much. The smelly Italian sandwiches that marked her as different. The teasing. The daily reminder that her family was different and she didn’t quite fit in.
Italy winning the World Cup in 1982 was the turning point. For the first time, being Italian felt like something to be proud of — and she never looked back.
When a musical theatre troupe visited her high school she knew immediately that she wanted in. She enrolled in Radio and Television Arts and discovered something unexpected. She loved being in front of the camera. She was just more interested in being behind it.
From the Screen to the Page
It turned out that talking too much was a competitive advantage. A career at CHIN Radio and CIAO Radio — among Canada’s first multicultural broadcasters — surrounded her with the voices of immigrant communities finding their place. She found hers too. The girl who once blended in to survive was now amplifying the voices that didn’t always get heard.
Radio led to film. Film led to a life she hadn’t imagined. In 1997 she left her tight-knit Italian family and moved to England as Head of Children’s Programming for PolyGram. She didn’t think she would survive the year. Eight passed. She travelled the world, immersed herself in languages and cultures, and took cooking courses everywhere she landed. Every country had a kitchen. Every kitchen had a story.
She was blindsided when the restructuring came. The same company that let her go called back within days with a consulting contract. She took it — and instead of looking for the next executive role, she built her own company. Loreworks Ltd. was founded in 2002.
Motherhood shifted everything else. Still consulting, still travelling, but every trip away from her children made it clear something had to change. With a newborn in tow she applied to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris — fulfilling a lifelong dream and rediscovering a cultural inheritance she hadn’t realised she was in danger of losing. Growing up, every season in the Cunti household had its ritual — from sausage to sauce to struffoli — each one a thread of identity she had carried without knowing it.
She moved back to Toronto with her young children and, inspired by their dreams of going to space, cold-called Canadian astronaut Dr. Dave Williams with a TV show idea. After a year of trying she finally reached him. Their partnership produced her first published books.
She was in her late 40s. She had just become a children’s author. That belief in the kitchen as classroom would later find its fullest expression in The Reindeer Café Cookbook — her World Cookbook Award winning title whose proceeds support StepStones for Youth. Because teaching a young person to cook is teaching them to believe in themselves.
Food, Family &
Fun In Functioning
One book led to another. Every chapter of her life became the next story she needed to tell — the restless kid who didn’t fit in finding her way through food, through story, through reinvention.
Even after winning awards with her first five books, the rejection kept coming. Then came a far heavier blow — the sudden, untimely death of her brother. She stepped in to help run the family business, launched Loreworks Press, and kept writing.
Gogo the flamingo began as a male character — until Loredana realized she was Gogo. A woman who had spent years losing confidence, second-guessing herself, wondering if she was in the right room. Gogo became a flamingo. How Gogo Found Her Groove became something more than a picture book — a reminder, wrapped in feathers and humour, that breathing, moving, and dancing are some of the most powerful tools we have for finding our way back to ourselves.
The girl who once hid her Italian sandwiches at school is now making videos with her "SuperMa" and writing and producing Neapolitan Ice Cream: The Musical — giving the immigrant journey that shaped her, and the kitchen that fed her, a stage.
What drove her there through radio and film, Paris and and pastry chef, and loss and reinvention, was not a plan but a curiousity and an awarenes that it is neccesary to keep adapting at every turn. If there is one goal, it is to keep learning and to live by her strategy of Playful Resilience to cope with life's ups and downs and make conscious choices to find the joy in the every day.