Ali Stroker

Ali Stroker, born Alyson Mackenzie Stroker on June 16, 1987, is an American actress, singer, and author from Ridgewood, New Jersey. At age two, she sustained a spinal cord injury in a car accident with her brother Jake that left her paralyzed from the waist down. She grew up with her parents, Jody Schleicher and Jim Stroker, attended Ridgewood High School where she served as senior class president and performed in school musicals, and trained through the Summer Musical Theater Conservatory program at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. In 2009, she became the first person who uses a wheelchair to earn a degree from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, graduating with a degree in Fine Arts.

Stroker's early professional work included a 2007 performance in Ryan Scott Oliver's Mrs. Sharp at NYU, directed by Ryan Mekenian, alongside Alex Brightman and Scott Evans. She starred in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and later reprised that role at Philadelphia Theatre Company, earning a Barrymore Award nomination. In 2012, she competed on the second season of The Glee Project, advancing to the final episode and placing second. That finish secured her a guest role on Glee in 2013, in which she played Betty Pillsbury, Ms. Pillsbury's niece, in Season 4, Episode 14. She also appeared in the 2014 film Cotton, known alternatively as Everyday Miracles, and held a three-episode role as Wendy in the MTV series Faking It in 2014 and 2015.

In 2015, Stroker made history as the first actor who uses a wheelchair to appear on a Broadway stage, originating the role of Anna in Deaf West Theatre's revival of Spring Awakening. She returned to Broadway in 2019 when St. Ann's Warehouse's revival of Oklahoma!, in which she had played Ado Annie beginning in 2018, transferred to the Circle in the Square Theatre. For that performance, she received the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical, becoming the first person with a disability to be nominated for and win a Tony Award.

Beyond her Broadway work, Stroker has given solo performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., New York's Town Hall, and Lincoln Center. Her television credits include a role as Tamara in the ABC series Ten Days in the Valley in 2017, a 2020 appearance in Lifetime's Christmas Ever After, the role of Detective Allison Mulaney on Blue Bloods in 2021, and the role of Paulette in the mystery-comedy series Only Murders in the Building in 2021. In 2024, she sang the American national anthem at the closing ceremony of the Summer Paralympics in Paris.

Stroker is a founding member of Be More Heroic, an anti-bullying campaign that tours the country to connect with students. She co-chaired a 2016 awards luncheon for Women Who Care, which supports United Cerebral Palsy of New York City, and has traveled to South Africa with ARTS InsideOut to lead theater workshops for women and children affected by AIDS. She and theater director and actor David Perlow, whom she attended the 2019 Tony Awards with as her then-boyfriend, are founding directors of ATTENTIONTheatre and are now married.