Amy Poehler

Amy Meredith Poehler was born on September 16, 1971, in Newton, Massachusetts, and grew up in the nearby suburb of Burlington, the daughter of two schoolteachers, Eileen and William Poehler. The older of two siblings, she was raised in an Irish Catholic household that valued humor, storytelling, and a work ethic rooted in the middle-class rhythms of New England. From an early age she gravitated toward performance, staging skits at home and participating in school plays, though it was not until she enrolled at Boston College that the idea of comedy as a career fully took hold. There she joined the improvisational troupe My Mother's Fleabag and, after graduating in 1993 with a degree in media and communications, relocated to Chicago to train at the ImprovOlympic and Second City, the twin crucibles that have shaped so much of American sketch comedy.

In Chicago she met the collaborators who would define her early professional life, among them Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh. Together they formed the Upright Citizens Brigade, a long-form improv team that relocated to New York City in the mid-1990s and turned its irreverent, anarchic sensibility into a Comedy Central series that ran from 1998 to 2000. The group also founded the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, which became an influential training ground for a generation of comedians and remains one of Poehler's most enduring institutional legacies. The theatre's emphasis on ensemble play, generosity toward scene partners, and fearless commitment to the bit would echo throughout her later career.

Poehler joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2001, initially as a featured player before being promoted to the repertory company the same season, a rare and swift elevation. Over seven seasons she became one of the show's defining voices, known for sharply observed impressions of Hillary Clinton, Sharon Stone, Dakota Fanning, and Michael Jackson, and for recurring original characters such as the hyperactive one-legged Kaitlin and the Bronx teenager Betty Caruso. In 2004 she was promoted to co-anchor of Weekend Update alongside Tina Fey, making them the first all-female anchor team in the segment's history, and later continued the desk with Seth Meyers. Her final months on the show included a viral Sarah Palin rap performed while nine months pregnant, a moment that encapsulated her unflappable stage presence.

Leaving Saturday Night Live in late 2008, Poehler transitioned almost immediately into the role that would come to define her public image. Beginning in 2009 she starred as Leslie Knope, the relentlessly optimistic deputy parks director of fictional Pawnee, Indiana, in NBC's Parks and Recreation. Across seven seasons she anchored an ensemble that grew into one of the most beloved sitcoms of its era, earning numerous Emmy nominations and winning a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy in 2014. Leslie's waffle-loving civic idealism became a cultural touchstone, and Poehler's producing credits on the show signaled her growing interest in shaping projects from behind the camera as well as in front of it.

Her film career developed in parallel with her television work. She appeared in Mean Girls in 2004 as the breezily inappropriate "cool mom," reunited with Tina Fey for the 2008 surrogacy comedy Baby Mama, and lent her voice to a wide range of animated projects, including Horton Hears a Who!, Shrek the Third, and Free Birds. Her most celebrated voice role arrived in 2015 when she played Joy, the sunny emotional lead of Pixar's Inside Out, a performance that reached a global audience and cemented her gift for channeling warmth without cloying sweetness. She reprised the role in the 2024 sequel Inside Out 2, one of the highest-grossing animated films in history.

Behind the scenes, Poehler established herself as a producer and creative entrepreneur. She co-founded Paper Kite Productions, the company responsible for Broad City, the Comedy Central series created by Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer that Poehler executive produced across all five of its seasons. Paper Kite also produced the Hulu series Difficult People, the NBC quiz show Russian Doll's sibling Making It, which Poehler co-hosted with Nick Offerman, and the dark comedy Welcome to Me, the 2014 Shira Piven feature starring Kristen Wiig that Poehler shepherded as a producer. In 2011 she launched Smart Girls at the Party with Meredith Walker and Amy Miles, an online platform and nonprofit arm dedicated to encouraging young women to cultivate their intelligence and individuality. She has directed as well, making her feature directorial debut with Netflix's Wine Country in 2019 and following with the teen comedy Moxie in 2021.

Poehler's 2014 memoir Yes Please became a New York Times bestseller, blending essays on her upbringing, career, and divorce with reflections on motherhood, female friendship, and the craft of improv. The book's title phrase, drawn from her philosophy that saying yes opens doors while politeness keeps them open, has become something of a personal signature. She has continued to expand her range, narrating documentaries, hosting the Golden Globe Awards alongside Tina Fey in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2021, and returning to network television in 2025 with new projects developed through Paper Kite.

In her personal life, Poehler married fellow comedic actor Will Arnett in 2003 after meeting through the Upright Citizens Brigade community. The couple had two sons, Archie and Abel, before separating in 2012 and divorcing in 2016. She has spoken candidly in interviews and in Yes Please about the difficulty of that period and the ways friendship, therapy, and work helped her through it. She has been in a long-term relationship with comedian Benjamin Graf since the mid-2010s and divides her time between Los Angeles and New York.

Across more than three decades in comedy, Amy Poehler has combined the rigor of improv training with the ambition of a studio-era multi-hyphenate, moving fluidly between sketch, sitcom, voice work, producing, directing, and writing while mentoring the performers who have come up behind her.