Erica Ikeda

Erica Ikeda is currently a Los Angeles based actor. She earned her BFA in Acting from the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, IL where she received training in acting, Shakespeare, movement, voice and speech, stage combat, scene study, etc... While she was in Chicago she also studied improvisation at the Improv Olympic (IO) and performed with the Chicago based Asian Sketch Comedy group, Stir Friday Night. Past performers of this group include Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead and Danny Pudi from Community. She was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan to a white American mother and a Japanese father. She speaks both English and Japanese fluently. She started out performing as a child in a bilingual (English/Japanese) theatre performance group in Tokyo. She then went on to study acting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts for a couple of summers in her high school years before being accepted in the acting conservatory at DePaul. Ever since moving to LA Erica has been working on her film and TV career with the intention to further widen the scope of who society sees in the media. America has always seen less people of Asian descent on TV and film but even fewer people who are mixed race. Erica knows that a huge part of the reason she is here and is able to continue to follow her dream and her passion is because of the wonderful and courageous artists who came before her. These beautiful artists may not have had the perfect face, skin color, or size that society was used to seeing on TV or Films screens but continued on their journey anyway to get to where they are. This gave a people like Erica the possibility to stand on the platform they had created, allowing new artists to stand on their shoulders and continue to break new ground. Erica hopes to one day be able to lend her shoulders to upcoming artists in this industry with her body of work as she continues her own journey in her chosen profession.