Constance Shulman

Constance Ann Shulman, born April 4, 1958, in Johnson City, Tennessee, is an American actress whose career spans stage, film, and television. One of seven children born to Herbert Lipner Shulman and his wife, a Jewish-American couple who had relocated from Fall River, Massachusetts, she is also the granddaughter of Judge Sadie Lipner Shulman. After earning a bachelor's degree in speech and theater from the University of Tennessee in 1980, she moved to New York City to study at the Circle in the Square Theatre School.

Shulman established her stage credentials early, originating the role of Annelle in the first Off-Broadway production of Steel Magnolias in 1987. Her Off-Broadway work continued in subsequent decades, including a starring role in Barbecue in 2015 and a performance in Bobbie Clearly in 2018 that earned her a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play. In 2019, she appeared on Broadway in the revival of The Rose Tattoo. She also starred in the Manhattan Theatre Club production of The Best We Could in 2023.

Her screen career began with the 1989 comedy film Fletch Lives, in which she played Cindy Mae. She went on to appear in Lost Angels (1989), Men Don't Leave (1990), and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991). Beginning in 1991, she provided the voice of Patti Mayonnaise on the animated sitcom Doug, a role she continued through 1999 and reprised in the 1999 film Doug's 1st Movie. Her television work in the 1990s also included a recurring role on the short-lived 1996 ABC sitcom The Faculty and an appearance in the unaired CBS pilot Heavens to Betsy (1994). She stepped away from on-screen work in the late 1990s to raise her two children.

Shulman returned to television prominently in 2013 when she was cast as Yoga Jones in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, a role she held for five seasons before departing in 2017 and returning for the series finale in 2019. As part of the ensemble cast, she received Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2015, 2016, and 2017. She subsequently appeared in the films Nasty Baby (2015) and Most Likely to Murder (2018) and guest-starred on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Broad City, and The Blacklist. In 2021, she starred in the independent films Giving Birth to a Butterfly and Strawberry Mansion. She later took on a recurring role in the HBO Max comedy series Search Party in 2022 and was cast as a series regular in the Showtime comedy The Curse that same year.

Shulman is married to actor Reed Birney. Their daughter, Gus Birney, is also an actress.