Nina Arianda Matijcio (born September 18, 1984) is an American actress. She won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance as Vanda Jordan in Venus in Fur, and she was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for portraying Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. She starred in Amazon Studios legal series Goliath and starred in the biographical film Stan & Ollie (2018) as Stan Laurel's wife Ida.
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Early life and education
Nina Arianda Matijcio was born on September 18, 1984, in Manhattan, New York, to Lesia, a painter and teacher of English as a second language, and Peter Matijcio, a logistics expert for the Department of Defense. Her parents were born to Ukrainian refugees in Germany after World War II. She grew up in Clifton, New Jersey, and Heidelberg, Germany.
Arianda became interested in acting as a child, declaring at age 9 that she wanted to become a professional actress. She attended LaGuardia High School for one semester before her father’s job took her family to Heidelberg, where she finished high school. As a teen, she got involved with Roadside Theater, a community theater at U.S. Army Garrison Heidelberg.
She returned to New York for college in 2002, beginning her studies at American Musical and Dramatic Academy, earning a bachelor of arts at The New School, and a master of fine arts in acting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2009.
