Shakina Nayfack is an American actor, performance artist, choreographer, producer, writer, director, and transgender activist. She was born on December 8, 1980 in Ventura County, California.
Nayfack attended University of California Santa Cruz where she received a B.A. in Community Studies with a minor in Theater Arts as well as a Graduate Certificate in Theater Arts. She went on to pursue an M.F.A. in Experimental Choreography and a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at University of California Riverside.
She is the voice of Hana in the English dub of the 2003 Japanese animated film Tokyo Godfathers.
In 2013, Nayfack crowd-funded her gender confirmation surgery through a "Kickstart Her" campaign.
She is Founding Artistic Director of New York's Musical Theatre Factory. Since its founding in 2014, MTF has been an inclusive community wholly dedicated to the developmental process of innovative new musicals by early-career artists. As the Founding Artistic Director of MTF, she helped to develop hundreds of new musicals, including Michael R. Jackson's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop and her own autobiographical glam-rock odyssey, Manifest Pussy.
In 2014 she appeared in the film Death Drive.
In 2015, she received the Lilly Award, which supports women in the theater and promotes gender parity for theatrical productions, in the "working miracles" category. Nayfack has also received the TRU Humanitarian Award from Theatre Resources Unlimited (2016) and the Beatrice Terry Fellowship Award from the Drama League (2017).
In 2016, she took Manifest Pussy on tour in North Carolina in response to HB2.
She is most notable for her series regular role as Lola, the trans 9/11 truther, on three seasons of the Hulu television program Difficult People (2016-2017), on which she is also a writing consultant.
In 2017 she also appeared in the TV show The Detour on TBS, and in 2019 in Marvel's Jessica Jones on Netflix.
She plays the role of Ava in the 2019 "Musicale Finale" of Amazon's GLAAD Award-winning show Transparent. Nayfack also served as a writer and producer on the finale.
In 2020, Nayfack made history as the first transgender person to have a starring role in a network comedy, on NBC's Connecting...
Her play Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club premiered on Audible in 2020 in collaboration with Williamstown Theatre Festival and was recognized with a 2021 Drama League Award for Best Audio Theater Production.
Nayfack made television history once again in 2023 with her debut as writer and director on NBC's Quantum Leap 12th episode "Let Them Play", a celebration of Trans youth!
