Ayo Edebiri Biography

Ayo Edebiri was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Bajan mother and Nigerian father. Her journey started in eighth-grade drama class at Boston Latin School, where she joined the improv club. After graduating high school, Ayo went to New York University where she originally studied to be a teacher before switching her major to dramatic writing.

In her junior year, Ayo began pursuing a career in comedy, and became an intern at the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv and sketch comedy group whose alumni include Amy Poehler and Adam McKay.

Ayo made her on-screen debut as a guest star on the TV series Defectives in 2014. Around that time, she started her career as a stand-up comedian and performed a set on Comedy Central’s Up Next. For the next six years, she made her way through the comedy scene, where she met fellow comedian Rachel Sennott. Together they wrote and starred in the Comedy Central digital series Ayo and Rachel Are Single, which began airing in 2020.

That same year, Ayo made her feature debut in an uncredited role in the film Shithouse (2020) and later appeared in How It Ends (2020) with Cailee Spaeny. In 2020, Ayo took over the voice role of Missy on the animated series Big Mouth after Jenny Slate stepped down so the role could be played by a Black actress. Ayo would eventually join the writing staff for the series’ fourth season.

Ayo has done numerous voice roles outside of Big Mouth. She is the voice of April O’Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023), as well as its spin-off series, Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She has also had roles in Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse (2023) and Inside Out 2 (2024).

Continuing her career in television, in 2021 she wrote for and acted on the second season of the Apple+ TV series Dickinson with Hailee Steinfeld.

In 2022, Ayo’s star reached new heights when she landed a starring role on the FX series The Bear alongside Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, which also runs on Disney+. The series was a huge hit with critics and fans and Ayo received numerous accolades for her performance. She was nominated for two Emmys, Golden Globes, SAG Awards and Critics Choice Awards, for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy, winning one of each.

In the series’ third season she made her directorial debut with the episode “Napkins.” The episode was labeled one of the best of the season and Ayo was nominated for a DGA award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Comedy Series. She described the experience as “making a Venn diagram out of a thousand circles.”

Her feature film résumé continued to grow after appearing in the films Theater Camp (2023) and Bottoms (2023), reteaming with Rachel Sennott. In 2025, she was the lead in the A24 film Opus (2025) with John Malkovich and Juliette Lewis.

Filmography:

Opus (2025)
Inside Out 2 (2024)
Omni Loop (2024)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
The Sweet East (2023)
We Lost Our Human (2023)
Bottoms (2023)
Theater Camp (2023)
Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between (2022)
As of Yet (2021)
How It Ends (2021)
Cicada (2020)
Shithouse (2020)