Cooper studied art history at the University of Sussex graduating in 1996; she studied Dutch and Flemish painters for her master's degree. She obtained a D Phil from the University of Sussex in 2002. She was Assistant Curator of the College Art Collections and taught art history at University College London. She moved to the NPG in 2002 to become the 16th Century Curator. She led the seven-year "Making Art in Tudor Britain" project. This project encompassed a detailed and comprehensive scientific survey of Tudor paintings in the NPG. The NPG received a grant from the Getty Foundation to enable her to write Citizen Portrait based in part on her D Phil dissertation together with her research in her role as curator at the NPG. In 2010 she was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Paul Mellon Centre which enabled her to complete the book. She was appointed Chief Curator at the NPG in 2011 and was elected as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in June of that year. In January 2018 she became the National Trust's Curatorial & Collections Director. In this role she will deliver the Trust’s curatorial strategy, including research, engagement, and care for collections and buildings.
Exhibitions
During her time at UCL, she curated two exhibitions from the college's collections. She co-curated the exhibition Elizabeth I at the National Maritime Museum in 2003 and was a contributor to the catalogue. She curated Searching for Shakespeare at the National Portrait Gallery in 2006. She was the curator of the exhibition Elizabeth I & her people which was held at the NPG from October 2013 to January 2014. This exhibition included a miniature portrait of Elizabeth I found in a house clearance in 2012, that Cooper described as "a very high quality image by a 16th-century artist". She also curated the display The Real Tudors at the National Portrait Gallery, which includes results from the NPG's "Making Art in Tudor Britain" research project. She is co-editor of Painting in Britain 1500 - 1630: Production, Influences, and Patronage, an interdisciplinary survey published by the British Academy and Oxford University Press in 2015.
