Kimiko Glenn

Kimiko Glenn is an American actress, singer, and voice actress born on June 27, 1989, in Phoenix, Arizona. Her mother, Sumiko, is Japanese, and her father, Mark, is of Scottish, Irish, and German descent. Glenn grew up alongside her sister, Amanda, and began performing at the Valley Youth Theatre in Phoenix and other local venues as early as fifth grade. She attended Desert Vista High School before enrolling at the Interlochen Arts Academy boarding school in Interlochen, Michigan. A 2007 YoungArts alumna, she subsequently studied musical theatre at the Boston Conservatory, though she left after her first year when she was cast in a national touring production.

That tour, the first U.S. national tour of Spring Awakening — the rock musical with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Steven Sater — marked Glenn's professional breakthrough in 2008, when she was cast as Thea while still in her freshman year of college. The production launched a Broadway career that spanned from 2008 to 2016. In 2016, she returned to Spring Awakening's world on Broadway, and that same year was cast as Dawn Pinkett in the Broadway transfer of the musical Waitress. The production began previews on March 25, 2016, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre and officially opened on April 24.

Concurrent with her stage work, Glenn built a substantial screen career. In 2013, she was cast as Brook Soso, an inmate at Litchfield Penitentiary, in the Netflix comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black. The role earned her Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Also in 2016, she appeared as Liv Kurosawa in the drama-thriller film Nerve, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and based on a young adult novel of the same name. In 2014, she appeared in the Lena Dunham-directed music video for "I Wanna Get Better," a single from Jack Antonoff's solo project Bleachers.

Glenn has established a prominent presence in voice acting. Beginning in 2018, she voiced Peni Parker in the Spider-Verse animated film trilogy. Additional voice credits include the Netflix animated film Over the Moon (2020), the Disney Channel series DuckTales (2017–2021), Voltron: Legendary Defender (2017–2018), Summer Camp Island (2018–2023), and the Netflix animated film My Little Pony: A New Generation (2021), in which she voiced Izzy Moonbow. In 2023, she began voicing the title character, Kiff Chatterley, in the Disney Channel animated series Kiff. In 2024, she took on the roles of Niffty and Susan in Hazbin Hotel.

Beyond voice work, Glenn starred as Harlow in the comedy web series Liza on Demand beginning in 2018, alongside Travis Coles and creator Liza Koshy, and appeared as a guest presenter with Nev Schulman on the MTV series Catfish in 2019. In 2023, during the SAG-AFTRA strike, Glenn publicly disclosed that she had received only $27.30 in royalties despite appearing in 44 episodes of Orange Is the New Black, speaking out on social media about inequitable residual payments. Glenn began releasing music under the stage name KIMIKO in July 2025, with her debut single "Oh Honey" arriving on July 2, 2025, followed by "Hang Out Forever?" on November 14, 2025, accompanied by an official music video released the same day and a lyric video on November 21, 2025.