page_title: Mia Kirshner
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Mia Kirshner / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Canadian actress Mia Kirshner in 2009, during interview
context_page_description: Mia Kirshner is a Canadian actress, writer and social activist. She is known for television roles as Mandy in 24, as Jenny Schecter in The L Word, and as Amanda Grayson in Star Trek: Discovery. Her film credits include Love and Human Remains, Exotica, The Crow: City of Angels, Mad City, Not Another Teen Movie and The Black Dahlia.
context_section_description: Kirshner started her career in 1989 in "Loving the Alien", a second-season episode of War of the Worlds' as both Jo, a young resistance fighter who is captured and  duplicated by the enemy aliens, and her doppelgänger. Kirshner made her film debut in 1993 at the age of 18 in Denys Arcand's Love and Human Remains. She convinced her father to sign a "nudity waiver" to play a dominatrix. The following year, she starred in Atom Egoyan's Exotica. In 1996, she appeared in The Crow: City of Angels. She also played Kitty Scherbatsky in the 1997 version of Anna Karenina.
  Kirshner also appeared in the first three episodes of 24 as the assassin Mandy in 2001. She would later reprise the role for the second season's finale and in the latter half of the show's fourth season. Also in 2001, Kirshner played Catherine Wyler, The Cruelest Girl in School, in Not Another Teen Movie. The character is primarily a spoof of Kathryn Merteuil (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Cruel Intentions, and was partially based on Mackenzie Siler (played by Anna Paquin) from She's All That. In Marilyn Manson's music video for "Tainted Love", which was featured on the movie's soundtrack, she made a cameo appearance as her character Catherine Wyler.
  In 2004, Kirshner was cast as author Jenny Schecter, a main character in the drama series The L Word. She remained with the show for all of the show's six seasons through 2009.
  In 2006, she starred in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia in which she plays the young aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose mutilation and murder in 1947 remains unsolved. While the film itself was critically panned, many reviews singled out her performance for acclaim.  Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, in a largely negative review, notes that the eponymous character was "played wonderfully by Mia Kirshner..."  Mick LaSalle wrote that Kirshner "makes a real impression of the Dahlia as a sad, lonely dreamer, a pathetic figure." J. R. Jones described her performance as "haunting" and that the film's fictional screen tests "deliver the emotional darkness so lacking in the rest of the movie." In 2010, Kirshner co-starred in the film 30 Days of Night: Dark Days which began filming in the fall of 2009. In 2010, she was cast as Isobel Flemming, a guest role on The Vampire Diaries.
  In 2011, she voiced the title character in Bear 71, a National Film Board of Canada web documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
  On April 20, 2012, it was announced that Kirshner would join the new Syfy series Defiance.
  On October 9, 2013, it was mentioned on the Showcase blog that Kirshner would be one of several guest stars in season four of the television series Lost Girl.
  In 2018, she began a recurring role on Star Trek: Discovery playing Amanda Grayson, foster mother of series protagonist Michael Burnham and mother of Spock, a role originated by Jane Wyatt on the original Star Trek.
  On September 5, 2019, Entertainment Tonight's news outlet ET Online reported that Kirshner would play a character in Lifetime Television's movie, The College Admissions Scandal, with co-star Penelope Ann Miller in roles inspired by real life Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin's and Felicity Huffman's involvement in a massive college admissions bribery scam. Describing her role, Kirshner was quoted saying "This story is about privilege and corruption and it's about people who don't follow the rules because they think they're above rules... My character (based on Lori Loughlin but named "Bethany" in the film) is so corrupt, greedy, narcissistic, self-centered, and the dialogue is hilarious, so I'm glad that they're able to capture humor about this as well."
caption: Kirshner in September 2009
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