Nina Arianda

Nina Arianda Matijcio, born September 18, 1984, in Manhattan, New York, is an American actress whose Broadway career spans from 2011 to 2015. Her parents, Lesia, a painter and ESL teacher, and Peter Matijcio, a logistics expert for the Department of Defense, were both born to Ukrainian refugees in Germany following World War II. Arianda grew up between Clifton, New Jersey, and Heidelberg, Germany, where her father's work eventually relocated the family. She attended LaGuardia High School for one semester before completing her secondary education in Heidelberg, where she also became involved with Roadside Theater, a community theater at U.S. Army Garrison Heidelberg. She had expressed a desire to become a professional actress from the age of nine.

Arianda returned to New York in 2002 to pursue formal training, beginning at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy before earning a bachelor of arts from The New School and a master of fine arts in acting from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2009. Prior to her Broadway debut, she appeared Off-Broadway in Venus in Fur in 2010, playing Vanda Jourdain in the comedy-drama.

Her Broadway debut came in April 2011, when she took on the lead role of Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday alongside James Belushi and Robert Sean Leonard. That performance earned her a 2011 Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play. Later that same year, Venus in Fur transferred to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway, and her work in the production brought her the 2012 Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play, with her character identified in the database credits as Vanda Jordan. In 2015, Arianda returned to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre to reprise her role in Fool for Love opposite Sam Rockwell, directed by Daniel Aukin, having first performed the production with Rockwell at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in July 2014. She also appeared on Broadway in Barack during her active Broadway years.

Beyond the stage, Arianda has worked extensively in film and television. Her film credits include Win Win, Tower Heist, Midnight in Paris, Rob the Mob, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Florence Foster Jenkins, in which she played Agnes Stark, and Stan & Ollie, in which she portrayed Ida Kitaeva, the wife of comedian Stan Laurel. In 2019, she appeared alongside Sam Rockwell in Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell. On television, she was cast in Hannibal season three in January 2015 as Molly, the wife of Will Graham, played by her former Broadway co-star Hugh Dancy. She co-starred in all four seasons of the Amazon Studios legal series Goliath from 2016 to 2021 and also appeared in the fourth season of Billions. In 2014, she appeared in the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of Tales From Red Vienna.