Film, stage, and television actress and singer Miriam Shor was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but grew up in Italy where her academic father was teaching and studying. Active in the arts in high school, Shor was among the first people in the newly formed BFA theater program at the University of Michigan.
In the early 1990s Shor moved to New York City and landed to role in on the many off-Broadway productions, most successful of which rock musical "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (1998-2000) by John Cameron Mitchell, where she played drag queen Yitzhak. In 2001 she starred in the critically successful film adaptation of the musical.