Mindy Kaling

Vera Mindy Chokalingam (born June 24, 1979), known professionally as Mindy Kaling, is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter, and producer.

Known for her extensive work on television, she has received numerous accolades including two Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Tony Award, and six Primetime Emmy Awards nominations.

The family immigrated to the United States in 1979, the same year Kaling was born.

Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, in 1997.

The following year, she entered Dartmouth College, where she was a member of improvisational comedy troupe The Dog Day Players and a cappella group The Rockapellas, produced the comic strip Badly Drawn Girl in The Dartmouth (the college's daily newspaper), and wrote for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, the college's humor magazine.

Kaling graduated from Dartmouth in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in playwriting.

She was a classics major for much of college and studied Latin, a subject she had been learning since the seventh grade.

She lists the comedy series Dr. Katz, Saturday Night Live, Frasier and Cheers as early influences on her comedy.

While a 19-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth, Kaling was an intern on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

She has said that she never saw a family like hers on TV, which gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing.

She thinks the "everyone against me" mentality is what she learned as a child of immigrants.

She named her Mindy Project character Mindy Lahiri after author Jhumpa Lahiri.

After college, she moved to Brooklyn, New York.

She said one of her worst job experiences was as a production assistant for three months on the Crossing Over With John Edward psychic show.

She described it as "depressing."

During this same time, she performed stand-up comedy.

Kaling devised her stage name after discovering while doing stand-up comedy that emcees would have trouble pronouncing her last name, Chokalingam, and sometimes made jokes about it.

She toured solo and with Craig Robinson, who was later a fellow cast member of The Office. In August 2002, she portrayed Ben Affleck in an off-Broadway play called Matt & Ben, which she co-wrote with her best friend from college, Brenda Withers, who played Matt Damon.

Time magazine named it one of their "Top Ten Theatrical Events of The Year", and it was "a surprise hit" at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival.

Initially, Withers and Kaling had, "for their own entertainment, mockingly pretended to be the best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck; that pretending spawned Matt & Ben, the goofy play that reimagined how Damon and Affleck came to write the movie Good Will Hunting."

She first gained recognition starring as Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office (2005–2013), for which she also served as a writer, executive producer, and director.

For her work on the series, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series.

Her film career includes voice roles in Despicable Me (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), and Inside Out (2015) as well as live action roles in No Strings Attached (2011), The Five-Year Engagement (2012), A Wrinkle in Time and Ocean's 8 (both 2018), and Late Night (2019), the last of which she also wrote and produced.

She wrote two memoirs both reaching The New York Times Best Seller list.

She also received a Tony Award for Best Musical as a producer for the musical A Strange Loop.

Kaling wrote a blog, Things I've Bought That I Love, which reemerged on her website on September 29, 2011.

She write it under the name Mindy Ephron, "a name Kaling chose because she was amused by the idea of her 20-something Indian-American self as a long-lost Ephron sister."

She gained wider attention for creating, producing and starring as Dr. Mindy Lahiri in the Fox/Hulu semi-biographical sitcom The Mindy Project (2012–2017), that was inspired some events in her early life.

In 2012, Kaling founded the production company Kaling International.

Kaling was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to father Avudaiappan Chokalingam, an architect, and mother Swati Chokalingam née Roy-Sircar, an obstetrician/gynecologist (OB/GYN).

She has an elder brother, Vijay.

Her parents are from India and met while working at the same hospital in Nigeria.

Her father, a Tamilian raised in Chennai, was overseeing the building of a hospital wing.

Her mother, a Bengali from Mumbai, was working as an OB/GYN.

Kaling's mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name, but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Bengal.

They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted, Kaling said, a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the TV show Mork & Mindy.

The name Vera is, according to Kaling, the name of the "incarnation of a Hindu goddess."

She was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013 and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts from President Joe Biden in 2022.

She then expanded her career creating numerous shows such as the NBC sitcom Champions (2018), the Hulu miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral (2019), the Netflix comedy series Never Have I Ever (2020–2023) and the HBO Max comedy series The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021–present).