Mindy Kaling

Vera Mindy Chokalingam (born June 24, 1979), known professionally as Mindy Kaling (/ˈkeɪlɪŋ/ ^ⓘ), is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. Known for her work on television, she has received a Tony Award and six nominations at the Primetime Emmy Awards. Among other honors, she has also received the Producers Guild of America's Norman Lear Achievement in Television Award and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts, which is the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government. Kaling founded the production company Kaling International in 2012.

Kaling first gained recognition for playing Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office (2005–2013), on which she also worked as a writer. Credited with twenty-four episodes, Kaling was the most prolific writer among the staff. For her work on it, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. She gained wider attention for creating, producing and playing the title role in the Fox/Hulu sitcom The Mindy Project (2012–2017). She then created other television comedies, including Never Have I Ever (2020–2023), The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021–2025), and Running Point (since 2025).

Her film career includes voice roles in Despicable Me (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014), and Inside Out (2015) as well as live action roles in No Strings Attached (2011), The Five-Year Engagement (2012), A Wrinkle in Time (2018), Ocean's 8 (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.

Vera Mindy Chokalingam was born June 24, 1979, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a Tamil father, Avudaiappan Chokalingam and Bengali Christian mother, Swati Roysircar. Her parents who were then living in Nigeria, immigrated to the United States in 1979 with her elder brother, Vijay Chokalingam. Her father was an architect, and mother was an obstretrician/gynecologist at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Boston. Her 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 Nigeria. 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 show Mork & Mindy.

Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols School 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, 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 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.