Allison Williams

Allison Howell Williams was born on **April 13, 1988** in *Hartford, Connecticut* and raised in the affluent suburb of New Canaan. She is the daughter of renowned NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams and television producer Jane Gillan Stoddard, and she grew up alongside a younger brother who would later become a reporter. Williams attended New Canaan Country School and Greenwich Academy before enrolling at **Yale University**, where she majored in English, joined the secretive St. Elmo society, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in 2010. While at Yale she gained early internet fame through a viral “That’s Why I Chose Yale” promotional video and a mash‑up performance of “Nature Boy” set to RJD2’s “A Beautiful Mine,” which caught the eye of comedy producers and helped launch her digital presence on platforms such as YouTube and CollegeHumor. Her formative years were marked by an intense apprenticeship with the improv troupe Just Add Water, where she honed the quick‑wit timing that would become a hallmark of her style.

Williams’ breakthrough arrived when director Jordan Peele cast her as the unsettling Rose Armitage in the 2017 horror sensation *Get Out*, a role that leveraged her ability to blend charm with menace and earned her nominations from the MTV Movie Awards and the Screen Actors Guild. She later solidified her reputation as a “horror queen” with leading parts in *M3GAN* (2022) and its sequel *M3GAN 2.0* (2025), projects she also co‑produced. Television success followed with memorable turns as Marnie Michaels in HBO’s *Girls*, Kit Snicket in Netflix’s *A Series of Unfortunate Events*, and Lucy Smith in the award‑winning miniseries *Fellow Travelers*. Off‑screen, Williams married CollegeHumor co‑founder Ricky Van Veen in 2015 (divorced 2019) and later German actor Alexander Dreymon, with whom she shares a son born in 2021. Her career continues to blend comedy, drama, and genre‑defying horror, cementing her as a versatile and influential figure in contemporary American entertainment.