Background and career
Wanda Yvette Sykes (born March 7, 1964) is an American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. She was first recognized for her work as a writer on The Chris Rock Show, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999. In 2004, Entertainment Weekly named Sykes as one of the 25 funniest people in America. She is known for her recurring roles on CBS's The New Adventures of Old Christine (2006–10), and HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–2011). She received Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series nominations for her roles in ABC's Black-ish (2015–2022), and Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2020). She stars in The Upshaws (2021–2026) on Netflix, a HBO Max comedy series, The Other Two (2019–2023), and The Good Fight (2021).
Aside from her television appearances, Sykes has had a career in film, appearing in Monster-in-Law (2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Evan Almighty (2007), and License to Wed (2007). She has voiced characters in animated films including Over the Hedge, Barnyard, Brother Bear 2 (all in 2006), Rio (2011), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), Ice Age: Collision Course (2016), and UglyDolls (2019).
Wanda Sykes was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. Her family moved to Maryland when she was in the third grade. Her mother, Marion Louise (née Peoples), worked as a banker and her father, Harry Ellsworth Sykes, was a colonel in the U.S. Army at the Pentagon.
Sykes' family history was researched for an episode of the 2012 PBS genealogy program Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr. Her ancestry was traced back to a 1683 court case involving her ancestor, Elizabeth Banks, a free white woman and indentured servant, who gave birth to a biracial child, Mary Banks, fathered by a slave, who inherited her mother's free status. According to historian Ira Berlin, a specialist in the history of American slavery, the Sykes family history is "the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present."
Sykes attended Arundel High School in Gambrills, Maryland. She graduated from Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing and was in Alpha Kappa Alpha. After college, her first job was working for five years as a contracting specialist for the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland,
