Michelle Ang

Michelle Ang is an actor, director and producer. Born in Ōtautahi Christchurch to Malaysian Chinese parents, Ang was raised in Pōneke Wellington. She gained early recognition as a child actor on New Zealand and Australian screens. An extended acting career in film and television followed, in both Aotearoa and the USA, along with projects led creatively from behind the camera. Her work often centres on parenthood with a creative focus on “finding subversive ways to uplift the marginalized experience.”

As a child, Ang trained as a Junior Associate — an intensive dance programme comprising nine young people, selected from auditions nationwide — and performed in productions by the Royal New Zealand Ballet. At the age of 13, she became a core cast member on McDonald’s Young Entertainers (1997–99). Sharing mainstream popularity with the likes of long-running children’s programme What Now, the talent show featured Ang as part of a troupe who performed musical and variety numbers to a live studio audience. “It was water cooler viewing,” Ang reminisced in a 2025 interview on the impact of the show, “because everyone would watch on Sundays. I think Young Entertainers was an early precursor to the Idol shows.”

Her start in television saw her cast in dramatic roles on The Tribe (1999–2003) and the Australian soap opera Neighbours (2002–04). Alongside these formative acting experiences, she completed a double degree in Accounting with Commercial Law and a Science in Chemistry at Victoria University of Wellington in 2004. On dividing her time between acting and studying, Ang recalled she was “genuinely excited to be part of this industry” but also “had a lot of other interests...my parents are immigrant parents and there was a bit of ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to support yourself’. Solely being an actor, I think you should have a plan ‘B’. But also I think I was just lucky enough to be doing it. I was getting to practise and hone skills in the real world.”

After graduation, Ang appeared in Outrageous Fortune (2005–06) and in the Roseanne Liang-directed short film Take 3 (2008), before going on to star in Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets (2011). Ang was cast to play a version of Liang, whose feature film was an adaptation of Banana in a Nutshell (2005) — an autobiographical documentary about Liang’s engagement to her Pākehā boyfriend and the disapproval of her traditional Chinese parents. “It was such a unique situation to have the director of the film also be the person that I’m portraying, but it was also a really amazing resource for me, to be able to have her right there,” she noted on her approach to the role. A review for The Dominion Post highlighted Ang as “outstanding” and that her characterisation “gets to perfection the high achiever who is stubborn enough to follow her heart but not quite mature enough to work out how to do it in the open.” My Wedding and Other Secrets was the highest-grossing local film of 2011, with Ang winning Best Lead Actress in a Feature Film at the Aotearoa Film & Television Awards.

Ang’s next project, Chop/Stick, was her first solo theatre show as a performer. Sharing similarities with Take 3, in which she played an actor reduced to Asian character stereotypes in a series of casting auditions, the play looked at ethnicity in relation to Ang’s opportunities as an actress. In an interview for The Pantograph Punch, she explained the idea grew from a sense of career uncertainty:

I had come off the back of a couple of seasons of Outrageous [Fortune], which was fun, but I’d gotten nervous that there wasn’t much left for me to audition for in New Zealand. Looking back that was probably my own paranoia, but at the time it felt very real, and I felt limited a lot by my ethnicity and how the industry was looking at me as an ethnic actress, so I brought that to Jo [Holsted], and we thought it’d be an interesting thing to write a play about, and it grew from there.

Described in publicity as “an exploration into being Asian…and anyone in-between,” Chop/Stick premiered at the Basement Theatre in Auckland on 20 November 2012, with a second season performed at BATS Theatre (out-of-site) in Wellington in October 2013. Portraying 13 characters of diverse age, background and ethnicity, Ang was praised for balancing broad comedy with sharp observations on race, otherness and belonging, with one reviewer calling her performance “seamless and breathless.”

Around this time, Ang began to act predominantly in the USA, gaining profile as a series regular in MTV’s Underemployed (2012–13), which she cited as “a favourite TV project...because I felt validated by an American industry that I’d been trying to get into for so long”; as the voice of Omega in Star Wars: The Bad Batch (2021–24); and in spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462 (2015–16), for which she was nominated for Outstanding Actress in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series at the 2016 Emmy Awards. She returned to New Zealand screens in 2023 and 2025 opposite Sam Wang in Homebound 3.0, a comedy about a man and a woman who fake a relationship to appease their Chinese parents. The series and her performance were positively received, with The Spinoff observing, “Ang consistently steals every scene.”

Ang’s work in independent film led to her first producer's credit on For Izzy (2018), an Asian American drama directed by Alex Chu. Drawn to the script’s non-judgmental depiction of queerness in Asian households and its messy, unlikeable lead role — which she found rare given “the stereotyping that Asian women face” — Ang lobbied to both act in and co-produce the film. “I asked Alex if he would consider me joining the producing team and was delighted when he said yes. I have experience producing in commercials and had reached a point where I was interested in championing projects and stories that would add what was lacking in mainstream opportunities.” For Izzy enjoyed a lengthy Asian diaspora and LGBTQI+ film festival run, winning 11 awards including Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in 2018.

To support her development as a filmmaker, Ang founded the company A Grain of Rice Productions in 2019 and reunited with Roseanne Liang as a director’s assistant on the production of Shadow of the Cloud. For her first project as a director, Ang joined seven other Asian female directors on pre-production for Kāinga in early 2020. Candy, Ang and writer Mia Maramara’s contribution to the anthology film, centred on the sacrifices of a Filipina nurse working in Aotearoa while her daughter is pregnant back in Manila. Reviewing Kāinga, The Pantograph Punch wrote “Candy is layered with emotional subtlety. Director Michelle Ang is a great actor...She has brought her craft to her directing, with strong acting performances from her cast.”

While working on Kāinga, Ang was one of 12 emerging filmmakers selected for “a development programme created to address the need for more culturally diverse producers in the NZ screen industry.” On the back of this she directed several short-form projects, including Hair Now (2022) for The Spinoff and NZ on Air, a series documenting Asian women and their complicated relationship to hair; and AMAH (2024) for TVNZ’s ‘motherhood’ anthology, a cautionary tale about a career-driven scientist and the AI nanny she hires to rear her child.

Extending the theme of motherhood through a personal lens, Ang’s short film NAI/Milk, which she co-wrote with Alex Chu as well as produced, directed and starred in, tells the story of single Chinese woman struggling to balance her life with raising an infant son (played by Ang’s real child). Made from “a cathartic need to express her conflicting feelings about her experience of motherhood” and the initial shock of the realities of parenting, NAI/Milk screened at the 2023 Los Angeles Asia Pacific Film Festival and Show Me Shorts Film Festivals, where at the latter it was nominated for the Best Director, Best Actor and Best Editing awards.

Based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Ang most recently mentored young filmmakers through the University of Auckland’s Thriving at Crossroads intersectional youth health project, and is continuing her mentoring through the Day One Hāpai te Haeata initiative. She currently has a slate of feature film and series projects in development under A Grain of Rice Productions.

A Grain of Rice Productions

Michelle Ang on NZ on Screen

Michelle Ang’s DEGANZ member profile

Hair Now on The Spinoff

AMAH on TVNZ+

As director:

2025 — Homebound 3.0 (TV series), director of episode ‘Prenatal Trimester 101’
2024 — ADHD & Me (web series, six episodes)
2022 — Self-Help (web series, four episodes)
2022 — Kāinga (anthology feature film), director of story ‘Candy’
2019 — 1 Not 2 (art project video, for artist LIPS)

As producer/director:

2024 — Motherhood (anthology TV series), director of episode ‘AMAH’
2022 — Hair Now (web series, six episodes)
2021 — Riddle Me This

As producer/writer/director:

2021 — NAI/Milk (short film)

As producer/actor:

2018 — For Izzy (feature film)

As theatre actor/creator:

2012–13 — Chop/Stick, Basement Theatre, Tāmaki Makaurau; BATS Theatre (out-of-site) Pōneke

2018 — Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature (For Izzy, as co-producer)

2018 — Out on Film, Atlanta, Jury Award for Best Ensemble (For Izzy)

2011 — Aotearoa Film & Television Awards, Best Lead Actress in a Feature Film (My Wedding and Other Secrets)