Background and career
Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein ( lee-OHN; born April 4, 1979) is an American actress, executive producer, director and writer. Lyonne started her career as a child actress before expanding her career taking on mature roles in film and television, for which she was nominated for five Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards, and named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023. Lyonne made her first uncredited appearance in Heartburn (1986), had a recurring role in Pee-wee's Playhouse (1986), and a supporting role in Dennis the Menace (1993). She transitioned to taking on teen roles in several independent films such as Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), But I'm a Cheerleader (1999), and Party Monster (2003), as well as the American Pie film series (1999–2012). She found a career resurgence and Emmy Award-nominations for her performances as Nicky Nichols in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019), co-created, wrote, directed, and executive produced the Netflix series Russian Doll (2019–2022), and starred in the Peacock series Poker Face (2023–2025) and the Netflix film His Three Daughters (2024). In 2025, she publicly revealed herself as the co-founder of the artificial intelligence film studio Asteria, founded with her boyfriend Bryn Mooser in 2022 with the intent to create animated feature films with AI tools.
Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein was born on April 4, 1979, in New York City, the daughter of Orthodox Jewish parents Ivette Buchinger and Aaron Braunstein, a boxing promoter, race car driver, and radio host. Her mother was born in Paris, to Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor parents. Lyonne has joked that her family consists of "my father's side, Flatbush, and my mother's side, Auschwitz". Her grandmother, Ella, came from a large family, but only she and her two sisters and two brothers survived, which Lyonne has attributed to their blond hair and blue eyes. Lyonne's grandfather, Morris Buchinger, operated a watch company in Los Angeles. During the war, he hid in Budapest as a non-Jew working in a leather factory. Lyonne lived the first eight years of her life in Great Neck, New York. Then she emigrated with her family to Israel, where she stayed a year and a half. She participated in the 1989 Israeli children's film April Fool (Hebrew: אחד באפריל), which began her interest in acting. After her parents divorced, Lyonne and her older brother Adam returned to New York City with their mother. She grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she felt she was an outsider. Lyonne attended the Ramaz School, a private Jewish school, where she was a scholarship student who took Talmud classes and read Aramaic. She was expelled in her sophomore year for selling marijuana to classmates. Her mother moved the family to Miami and Lyonne briefly attended Miami Country Day School. Lyonne dropped from high school before her senior year. For a short time she studied film and philosophy at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her high school graduation depended on completing her first year at Tisch, but she left the program because she could not pay the tuition. Lyonne was estranged from her father, who was a Democratic candidate for New York City Council for the sixth District of Manhattan in 2013, and lived on the Upper West Side until his death in October 2014. She has said she was not close to her mother, who died in 2013, and has essentially lived independently of her family since age 16.
As a young child, Lyonne was signed by the Ford Modeling Agency. She was cast as recurring character Opal on Pee-wee's Playhouse at age seven, where she appeared between September and December 1986, and made her film debut that same year with a small part in the Mike Nichols comedy-drama Heartburn. Of her time working as a child actor, Lyonne later said, "I had to become coherent and a businesswoman at six. By 10, I was a jaded professional ... I don't think [my parents] knew better. It was a decision of [theirs] built on hopeful ignorance". After playing a supporting role as Polly in Dennis the Menace (1993), Lyonne was cast at age 16 in the Woody Allen-directed musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You (1996), where she co-starred as D.J., the daughter of main character Joe (played by Allen). This led to a headline role in the independent coming-of-age comedy Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), for which she received positive notices for her portrayal of Vivian Abromowitz. Writing for The Washington Post, Michael O'Sullivan said, "Lyonne is marvelous in conveying Vivian's combination of confusion, curiosity, disgust and desire at what body and psyche are going through. After playing a string of people's daughters [in other films], Lyonne really comes into her own here as an actress, registering as a person and not merely someone's little girl". In 1999, Lyonne starred as Megan Bloomfield, a sexually confused teenager, in the satirical romantic comedy But I'm a Cheerleader. Despite a mixed critical reception upon release, the film was instrumental in raising awareness of the harms of conversion therapy, and has since developed a cult following. In the same year, Lyonne played the small but crucial part of Jessica in American Pie (1999)—which grossed over US$230 million at the box office—reprising the role in two of the film's sequels. Other film appearances in 1999 included Christine in Detroit Rock City and a headline role in Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby. The latter, a follow-up to the 1996 original, was poorly received due to its violence and vulgarity, but Lyonne's portrayal of teenage prostitute Crystal Van Meuther was praised for its "earthy, hard-boiled" nature.
Lyonne played the part of Jeanne, a college activist fighting for lesbian equality, in the acclaimed 2000 television film If These Walls Could Talk 2. She then appeared in the well-received Holocaust drama The Grey Zone (2001), and continued to work steadily through the early 2000s, in mainstream projects such as Scary Movie 2 and Kate & Leopold (both 2001), and Blade: Trinity (2004), as well as smaller productions such as Zig Zag (2002), Die, Mommie, Die! and Party Monster (both 2003), Madhouse (2004), and My Suicidal Sweetheart (2005). In 2009, Lyonne headlined the experimental dark comedy The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, which was described as "relentlessly strange, courageous, and hyperactive" by The Austin Chronicle. In the 2010 horror parody All About Evil, her portrayal of a psychotic serial killer was particularly well received, with Film Threat commenting: "[its director] rightfully treats Lyonne as the superstar she is, giving us glimpses of the dark residing in [her] that made Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby [sic] the final cult masterpiece of the 20th century", noting that "her ability to unleash firehoses of ferocity is on full display here". Lyonne made her New York stage debut in the 2008 production of Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years at the Acorn Theatre. She was part of the original cast (October 2009–March 2010) of Love, Loss, and What I Wore—an off-Broadway play by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, based on the book by Ilene Beckerman. In 2010, Lyonne received positive notices for her performance in Kim Rosenstock's comedy Tigers Be Still at the Roundabout Theatre Company, with Charles Isherwood commenting in his review for The New York Times: "Ms. Lyonne [is] a thorough delight in the flat-out funniest role, the grief-crazed Grace, so deeply immersed in self-pity that she has cast aside any attempts at decorum". Lyonne starred in the 2011 production of Tommy Nohilly's Blood from a Stone at the Acorn Theatre. The following year, she participated in a benefit performance of Women Behind Bars.
Lyonne had a supporting role in Abel Ferrara's post-apocalyptic drama 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011), which Movieline called "weirdly compelling". Two years later, she began appearing on the Netflix comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black; her first television job as a series regular. Critics were effusive about her portrayal of prison inmate Nicky Nichols, for which she received a nomination for the 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, and was twice awarded—alongside her co-stars—the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Comedy Series (2015; 2017). Lyonne's work as hard-partying Lou in Antibirth (2016), a psychedelic horror feature inspired by the films of David Cronenberg, drew special attention; Alex McLevy wrote in a review for The A.V. Club, "The actor has experienced a remarkable resurgence in the past few years ... Here, she channels her storied past to play Lou... drug-addled... plays to Lyonne's strengths—a bluntly outsized personality, brash but likable, with a self-destructive streak bigger than the podunk town in which the story unfolds". Other film credits of hers include Sleeping with Other People, Hello, My Name Is Doris, Addicted to Fresno, Hashtag Horror (all 2015); Yoga Hosers, The Intervention (both 2016); Handsome (2017), Show Dogs (2018), Honey Boy (2019), and James Gray's science fiction thriller Ad Astra (2019). Lyonne made her directorial debut in the fall of 2017 with a surrealist short film, Cabiria, Charity, Chastity, for fashion brand KENZO. Shot by cinematographer Chung-Hoon-Chung, the film follows Chastity, a vaudeville performer, coming to terms with her past. In addition to writing and directing episodes of Russian Doll and Poker Face, Lyonne directed an episode of Orange is the New Black in its final season, and one episode each of the Hulu shows Shrill and High Fidelity. After the final season of Orange Is the New Black, Lyonne began starring as Nadia Vulvokov—a woman trapped in a time loop at her 36th birthday party—on Russian Doll, a comedy-drama series she created and produced along with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler. Debuting on Netflix in February 2019, the show was met with rave reviews, with Lucy Mangan of The Guardian calling it "fine [and] impressive," adding, "Nadia is a magnificent creation and Lyonne gives a performance to match". Meanwhile, Alan Sepinwall wrote in his review for Rolling Stone:
After battles with addiction and other health scares [in] the early-2000s, [Lyonne] has managed to revive her career ... a personal narrative arc that clearly informs Nadia's constant brushes with her own mortality ... Lyonne is such an idiosyncratic screen presence — not to mention so distinctly New York/Jewish/aggro — that most of the roles she's played, particularly as an adult, have barely bothered to delve beneath the surface of that persona ... Nadia, on the other hand, is unmistakably Lyonne ... It goes deeper and wider than anything she's gotten to play [since] her teenage days in indie films like Slums of Beverly Hills and But I'm a Cheerleader.
