Aparna Nancherla is an American stand-up comedian and actress based in Los Angeles. She was born on August 22, 1982, in Washington DC, USA, to a Telugu Hindu family. Her parents, Suchithra Nancherla and Ananth Nancherla, immigrated to the USA in 1970 from Hyderabad, India. She was raised outside Washington and attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. She studied psychology at Amherst College, Massachusetts, after which she returned to Washington, DC, where she started her stand-up career. Nancherla relocated to Los Angeles and later New York City to write for Totally Biased until the show’s discontinuation in 2013. In 2015, Nancherla worked as a staff writer on Late Night with Seth Meyers. She sees herself more as a stand-up comedian than a writer, as being the former provides the personal gratification of responding instantly to the audience’s mood. She has revealed in a podcast that she did her first comedy act at an open mic event on her birthday. Nancherla is best known for her appearances in A Simple Favor (2018), Mythic Quest (2020), and Crashing (2017). She made her acting debut in the Paul Feig film A Simple Favor. As a first-generation American Indian, she is the first South Asian female stand-up comedian, a fact that helped facilitate her career in this field. She is known for “observational comedy,” a genre based on minor aspects of everyday life, and deadpan, a deliberate non-display of any emotions leading to unintentional comedy.