Vera Mindy Chokalingam (born June 24, 1979), known professionally as Mindy Kaling (/ˈkeɪlɪŋ/), is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. She has received numerous accolades for her work, including two Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Tony Award, as well as nominations for six Primetime Emmy Awards. Kaling was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013. A decade later she received the Producers Guild of America's Norman Lear Achievement in Television Award, and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts from President Joe Biden.
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. Kaling gained wider attention for creating, producing and starring as Dr. Mindy Lahiri in the Fox comedy series The Mindy Project (2012–2017). 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).
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. Her memoirs, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2011) and Why Not Me? (2015), reached 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.
Early life
Vera Mindy Chokalingam 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. Kaling's 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. The family immigrated to the United States in 1979, the same year Kaling was born. 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." 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 the improvisational comedy troupe The Dog Day Players and the a cappella group The Rockapellas, was the creator of the comic strip Badly Drawn Girl in The Dartmouth (the college's daily newspaper), and was a writer for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern (the college's humor magazine).
Kaling graduated from Dartmouth College 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. Kaling lists the comedy series Dr. Katz, Saturday Night Live, Frasier and Cheers as early influences on her comedy.
