Emmy Award-winning actress and comedian Judy Gold is best known as the star of her two critically acclaimed, long-running Off-Broadway shows: The Judy Show – My Life as a Sitcom and 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother. Born in 1962 in Newark, New Jersey, Gold first did standup comedy on a dare when she was a music student at Rutgers University. After graduating in 1984, she began working as both a comedian and an actress, landing a gig on the Arsenio Hall Show and a recurring role on the sitcom All-American Girl in 1994. She continued to work on numerous TV shows, from the Drew Carey Show to 30 Rock, while also doing standup, both live and on television. Initially, she chose not to make her lesbian identity central to her work, but in 2006 she earned high praise, including the United Jewish Appeal’s Mother of the Year Award, the GLAAD Media Award, and a nomination for the Drama Desk Award, for her one-woman, off-Broadway show 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, based on her own experiences as a lesbian mother and interviews she had conducted with Jewish mothers around the country. The following year, she was featured in the film Making Trouble, a tribute to female Jewish comedians produced by the Jewish Women’s Archive. In July of 2011, The Judy Gold Show: My Life as a Sitcom, a one-woman show that is an homage to the sitcoms of Gold's youth, officially opened to rave reviews. From 1999 to 2010, Gold was the host of HBO’s At the Multiplex with Judy Gold. In 2015, she started her podcast, Kill Me Now with Judy Gold. Gold also won two Emmy awards for writing and producing The Rosie O’Donnell Show.