Ellie Kemper

Elizabeth Claire Kemper was born on May 2, 1980, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Dorothy Ann Kemper and David Woods Kemper, executive chairman of Commerce Bancshares, a bank holding company founded by the Kemper family. The second of four children, Kemper is the granddaughter of Mildred Lane Kemper, for whom the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis is named, and the great-great-granddaughter of banker William Thornton Kemper Sr. Her ancestry includes Italian, English, French, and German heritage, and she was raised as a Roman Catholic and remains a practicing one. Her younger sister, Carrie Kemper, works as a television writer.

The family relocated to St. Louis when Kemper was five years old. She attended Conway Elementary School in Ladue and later John Burroughs School, where she developed interests in theater and improvisational comedy. Among her teachers at John Burroughs was actor Jon Hamm, with whom she appeared in a school production. In 1999, at age nineteen, she was presented as a debutante at the Veiled Prophet Ball and was named the Veiled Prophet's Queen of Love and Beauty. Her participation became a source of public controversy in 2021 due to the Ball's history, which was characterized as racist and elitist, prompting Kemper to issue a statement denouncing white supremacy and apologizing for her involvement.

Kemper graduated from Princeton University in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. During her time there, she was a member of the improv comedy troupe Quipfire, the Princeton Triangle Club, and the Ivy Club. As a freshman, she was part of Princeton's 1998 national championship field hockey team, though she has noted she spent approximately 97 percent of her time on the bench before shifting her focus to theater. She subsequently attended Worcester College, Oxford, where she studied toward a master's degree in English literature.

After moving to New York City, Kemper performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade and the People's Improv Theater, appearing in productions including Death and/or Despair, Listen Kid, and The Improvised Mystery. She performed with the UCB house improv teams Mailer Daemon and fwand, and with the People's Improv Theater team Big Black Car. In March 2008, she wrote and performed the one-woman show Dumb Girls through the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and also performed in Feeling Sad/Mad with Ellie Kemper. She has written sketch comedy with collaborator Scott Eckert, a fellow Princeton graduate, and has contributed writing to The Onion, McSweeney's, and HuffPost. In August 2008, she auditioned for Saturday Night Live but was not cast. In July 2009, Variety named her one of its Ten Comics to Watch.

Kemper earned her Screen Actors Guild card through a commercial for a Kmart tent sale. She made regular appearances in comedy sketches on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in the late 2000s and made guest appearances on Important Things with Demetri Martin and E! Television's The Gastineau Girls, the latter of which, though a reality series, featured a scripted role for Kemper. In October 2008, she appeared on The Colbert Report. She also appeared in the 2009 film Mystery Team and the 2010 Sofia Coppola film Somewhere.

Her most prominent television role came when she was cast as Erin Hannon, a secretary, on the NBC sitcom The Office, beginning in April 2009. Originally conceived as a four-episode character, Kemper's performance led producers to sign her as a series regular beginning in the sixth season. The character, initially written as sarcastic, was reworked to be more optimistic to reflect Kemper's own personality, which Kemper described as an exaggerated version of herself. She remained with the series through 2013. From 2015 to 2019, she starred as the title character in the Netflix sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Her work on that series earned her two consecutive nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. Across her career, she has also received nominations for a Critics' Choice Movie Award, two Critics' Choice Television Awards, three Satellite Awards, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Her film credits include Bridesmaids (2011), 21 Jump Street (2012), Sex Tape (2014), and Home Sweet Home Alone (2021). In 2018, she published her debut book, My Squirrel Days. Kemper made her Broadway debut in 2023, appearing in Peter Pan Goes Wrong.