Jenny Slate

Jenny Slate is an American actress, stand-up comedian, and writer born on March 25, 1982, in Milton, Massachusetts, to Nancy (née Gilson) and Ronald "Ron" Slate. She has two sisters, and her family is Jewish. Slate graduated as valedictorian from Milton Academy before enrolling at Columbia University as a literature major, where she co-founded the improv group Fruit Paunch, performed in the Varsity Show, and first met comedian Gabe Liedman in 2000. She earned her degree from Columbia in 2004.

Following graduation, Slate and Liedman formed the comedy duo Gabe & Jenny and, alongside Max Silvestri, launched the live variety show Big Terrific, which Time Out New York named the best new variety show of 2008. Throughout 2008 and 2009, Slate also performed her solo show Jenny Slate: Dead Millionaire at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City. During the same period she made recurring appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in the sketch "7th Floor West," playing an NBC page later promoted to Fallon's assistant, and served as a regular commentator on VH1 programming. She also held a recurring role on Bored to Death.

Slate joined the cast of Saturday Night Live for the 2009–10 season, where she was known for the character Tina-Tina Cheneuse, an infomercial pitcher advertising personalized doorbells, car horns, and alarm clocks. Her tenure on the show ended after one season. In August 2010, she co-wrote and voiced the animated short film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On with Dean Fleischer Camp, which led to a sequel short and a children's book published on November 1, 2011. A second Marcel book followed in 2014. Slate and Fleischer Camp married in September 2012 and announced their separation in May 2016; they later collaborated on the 2021 Marcel the Shell with Shoes On feature film.

Slate's screen career expanded steadily through voice work and live-action roles. She voiced Ted's mother in The Lorax (2012) and first appeared on Parks and Recreation in the 2013 episode "Bailout" as Mona-Lisa Saperstein, a role she continued through 2015. She also appeared in the sitcoms Bob's Burgers beginning in 2012, House of Lies from 2013 to 2015, and Kroll Show from 2013 to 2015, where she played Liz B. in the recurring "PubLIZity" sketches and performed in nearly every episode. Her leading role in Gillian Robespierre's 2014 film Obvious Child, in which she played a young stand-up comedian navigating an unplanned pregnancy, marked a significant turning point in her career. For that performance she received the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress in a Comedy, the Best Breakout Performance award at the Newport Beach Film Festival, the Virtuosos Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and the Best Comedic Actress award from the Women Film Critics Circle.

Her voice work continued with Dawn Bellwether in Disney's Zootopia (2016) and Gidget in The Secret Life of Pets (2016), followed by roles in The Lego Batman Movie and Despicable Me 3 (both 2017), The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019), and Zootopia 2 (2025). In live-action film, she took on a supporting dramatic role as Bonnie Stevenson in Gifted (2017). From 2017 to 2020, Slate voiced the character Missy Foreman-Greenwald on the Netflix animated series Big Mouth, departing the role in June 2020 after publicly stating that Black characters on animated shows should be voiced by Black performers. In October 2019, she released the Netflix stand-up special Stage Fright. Her appearance in the Daniels' 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once as Big Nose contributed to the cast's Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

In 2025, Slate made her Broadway debut in All Out: Comedy About Ambition. She has also published several books, including Little Weirds (2019), a collection of personal writing about life and relationships, and About the House (2016), co-written with her father Ron Slate about their time in the family's Milton, Massachusetts home.

In her personal life, Slate became engaged to art curator and author Ben Shattuck in September 2019. She announced the birth of their daughter in February 2021, and the two married on New Year's Eve 2021 after three planned ceremonies were canceled during the COVID-19 pandemic. The family lived in Shattuck's childhood home in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, with plans to relocate to Brooklyn in the fall of 2025. Slate has described herself as agnostic.