page_title: Kristin Cooper
section_title: Family and personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Kristin Cooper / Family and personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper at an event at the Morehead Planetarium on the campus of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
context_page_description: Kristin Bernhardt Cooper is an American lawyer who has been First Lady of the state of North Carolina since January 1, 2017.
  Raised in Oklahoma City, Cooper moved to North Carolina to earn a Juris Doctor from Campbell Law School in 1982. After working as a staff attorney with the North Carolina General Assembly, she married Democratic Party politician Roy Cooper. Since 2003, she has worked professionally as a guardian ad litem for foster children.
  Roy Cooper was elected governor of North Carolina in 2016. Kristin Cooper, as the North Carolina First Lady, expanded the scope of her role and has focused on issues such as child poverty, hunger, literacy, and abuse, as well as the arts. She plans to visit all hundred of the state's counties.
context_section_description: In a committee meeting about salvage titles at the North Carolina General Assembly, where she was practicing law, Kristin Bernhardt met Roy Asberry Cooper III (b. 1957), an attorney and state legislator. They later married and raised three children, Hilary, Claire, and Natalie, in Rocky Mount, Nash County. All three daughters graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  Roy Cooper was first elected as a state representative and then was appointed to the state senate, where he eventually became the Democratic majority leader. From 2001 to 2017, he was North Carolina Attorney General. To live closer to the attorney general's office, the Cooper family moved to Raleigh, the state capital, after Hilary graduated from high school.
  When they were living in Rocky Mount, Kristin Cooper and her three daughters had starred in a production of the musical Camelot; in Raleigh, she and Claire had lead roles in the plays The Diary of Anne Frank and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Cooper "has also wielded a paintbrush, a chainsaw, and a snow cone machine all in the name of art", and attended weekly drama lessons at Raleigh Little Theatre (RLT)—another trainee there described her "a witty gal" who "could laugh at herself, genuinely compliment others and self-deprecate with the best". Cooper served two years on the board of the North Carolina Arts Council, which provides grants across the state. In 2017, she entered her second year on the RLT board, and she was previously on the board of the North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theater (NRATC). As first lady, Cooper moderated a panel discussion with female Wake County youth leaders after RLT's premiere of Grace for President in October 2017.
  Cooper has described herself as an amateur gardener and birdwatcher; she said she cultivated an interest in birding during the 1996 extreme weather event that snowed her in with three children, "a big window and a pair of binoculars and a field guide". In 2017, the first lady and the state Audubon society organized a renovation of the Executive Mansion's garden. Cooper has also led a knitting circle, a hobby she said her great-grandmother enjoyed. The first family has several pets: rescued cats Adelaide and Alexei and Hilary's dog Ben. Their dog Chloe died in May 2017 at age sixteen. Their praying mantis, Fred, died in June 2017 and was replaced by the orchid mantis Daisy.
caption: Roy Cooper, Governor of North Carolina, in 2017
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