Michelle was born in Castro Valley, California. She is a biracial Japanese American and is struggling to keep her four day streak on duolingo so she can finally communicate with her mom in her native language. She credits a string of bad bowl cuts as a child for her sense of humor as when she realized she wasn’t allowed to be pretty, she turned to being funny. Her parents have always told her she could do anything. When she was in fifth grade and didn’t get the role of Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events, her mom threatened to call the school to yell at them about why they were wrong. To this day, her mom is still on the phone with them. Michelle often says she is proudly becoming her father at the volume of her mother.

Michelle thought she was ivy league bound until she was rejected from nearly every college she applied to and then realized that she couldn’t afford the few she got into. Her inability to realize her pocket change didn’t add up to college tuition is probably the reason Harvard said “hard pass.” She ended up at Las Positas Community College which was nicknamed Lost Potential by her classmates. It was during this time that she began to re-examine what she was doing with her life – why had she even wanted to get into those schools anyways? At the time, she was a political science major and didn’t even like reading the news – the characters were poorly written and the storylines were too predictable.

Michelle took an acting class at Las Positas and loved it so much that she dropped out of college at age nineteen and moved to Los Angeles. Please don’t tell her parents. Unfortunately for her, she realized quickly that she was a terrible actress. But she had signed a year lease on her apartment so giving up wasn’t really an option. She had started doing improv and sketch classes along the way and found that while her bowl cuts were long gone, her passion for being funny was still there. Now an expert at re-examining what she’s doing with her life, Michelle decided to pursue comedy writing instead.

Working at Nickelodeon is a dream come true for Michelle. A lifelong lover of animation, she spent long hours watching SpongeBob SquarePants during her childhood. When she was a nanny and her boss wouldn’t let her kids watch SpongeBob, Michelle excitedly said, “I watched SpongeBob as a kid and loved it!” to which her boss wrote her weekly minimum wage check and said, “Well, look at how that turned out for you.” Look at how it turned out for me!

This was Michelle’s fourth time applying to the program. We only let her in because she ignored our “cease and desist” letters. The justice system is broken.