Lena Waithe

(b. 1984)

“My mission is to provide a space for people to grow, while making work that people can look at and say, ‘That broke a barrier.’”

Lena Waithe was born on May 17th, 1984 in Chicago, Illinois, and raised on the city’s South Side. Her parents divorced when she was only three. She was raised by her mother and grandmother, who supported her early dream of someday writing for television. Waithe attended Turner-Drew, a predominantly Black elementary magnet school, graduated from Evanston Township High School, and earned a degree in cinema and television arts from Columbia College Chicago.

Named by Variety as one of its 10 Comedians to Watch in 2014, Waithe had already begun to build her credentials as a writer on the Nickelodeon show, How to Rock, and as a producer of the film, Dear White People. She also wrote and appeared in the YouTube series Twenties, wrote and directed the short film Save Me, and wrote the Hello Cupid web series and the viral video, Sh*t Black Girls Say.

Waithe’s big break came after she was cast in the Netflix series Master of None, which premiered in 2015. Her role of Denise was originally written as a straight, white woman, but the show’s creators changed the character to be more like Waithe. “I know how many women I see out in the world who are very much like myself. We exist. To me, the visibility of it was what was going to be so important and so exciting,” Waithe said.

In 2017, Waithe and Aziz Ansari won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for the episode “Thanksgiving,” making Waithe the first Black woman to capture the award. The episode for which she won was partly based on her experiences coming out to her mother. During her acceptance speech, she thanked voters for “embracing a little Indian boy from South Carolina and a little queer Black girl from the South Side of Chicago.” That same year, Out magazine named Waithe the Out100: Artist of the Year, and The Advocate selected her as a finalist for its Person of the Year. To cap it all off, Waithe became engaged to her girlfriend, Alana Mayo.

In 2018, Waithe’s drama series, The Chi, premiered on Showtime. The series is based on Waithe’s experiences growing up on the South Side of Chicago. This success was quickly followed by release of the show Boomerang on BET, and later Twenties, as well as the film Ready Player One, with several other projects under way.   

We offer this biography in appreciation of Lena Waithe for her unapologetic, out loud, trailblazing contributions to television and film.