Anna Akana
| Anna Akana | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal information | |||||||||
| Born |
Anna Kay Akana August 18, 1989 |
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| Nationality | American | ||||||||
| Occupation | Filmmaker, actress, producer, comedienne | ||||||||
| Website | Official website | ||||||||
| YouTube information | |||||||||
| Channel(s) | AnnaAkana | ||||||||
| Years active | 2010–present | ||||||||
| Subscribers | 1,800,000+ | ||||||||
| Total views | 211,050,600+ | ||||||||
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Anna Kay Akana (born August 18, 1989) is an American filmmaker, producer, actress, comedian, and model. She is known for her YouTube channel, which has over 1.8 million subscribers and over 211 million video views.
Anna Akana was born August 18, 1989 to William and Mia Akana. Her ancestry is Japanese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Irish, German, Spanish, French, and English. Growing up, Akana's father was an officer in the United States Marine Corps. Her family moved every few years to a new state or country with his job. As a result, Akana picked up several dialects and languages including Japanese and Spanish.
On Valentine's Day 2007, Akana's 13-year-old sister Kristina committed suicide. Several months after her sister's death, Akana watched Margaret Cho perform on a Comedy Central special and laughed for the first time since the suicide. She began to see laughter as a means of trying to move on with her life and decided to seriously pursue comedy. Akana is very vocal about her sister's suicide and is a strong advocate for suicide prevention. In 2013, Akana uploaded a YouTube video called "please don't kill yourself" where she explains what it feels like to have a family member commit suicide. In that same year, she released a book called Surviving Suicide which contains her journal entries from the two years after her sister's death.
Akana first started performing comedy at the age of 19 but ended up switching her platform to YouTube in 2011 after experiencing massive panic attacks and anxiety before going on stage. Akana has since resumed performing stand-up.
In 2014, Akana formed a comedy music duo with fellow comedian and writer Megan Rosati called Cat Benatar.
Akana creates both comedy and documentary YouTube videos. In 2014, Akana was listed on New Media Rockstars Top 100 Channels, ranked at #72. In that same year, Akana decided to focus more on her skills as a director and attempted to make one short film a month. While she did not reach her goal of 12, she did make six short films which were received well by her YouTube audience. Akana starred in all of her short films and has starred in various other short films produced by other YouTube stars. Akana has since continued to create short films.
One of her short films titled Miss Earth was partially financed by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's production company New Form Digital. It was part of the 2014 Incubator, a series to showcase and produce original stories by YouTube Creators and filmmakers.Miss Earth was later adapted into a web series retitled Miss 2059 and released on Verizon's go90 app in June 2016.
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