Nikki is an actor, playwright and comedienne who has spent the last decade splitting her time between private tutoring and the self-production of her work out of Los Angeles. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Nikki graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Comparative Literature, with linguistic concentrations in German and French, academically focusing on intertextual analyses of operatic adaptions of plays regarding the transformative effect of music on original texts. During her time at Princeton, she also gained a certificate from the Department of Theatre and Dance where she was awarded the Francis LeMoyne Page Award as well as a certificate in poetry from the Creative Writing Department and was awarded the Fagels Prize for her creative thesis in Comparative Literature. She also won a Book Award from the German department and joined Phi Beta Kappa. After gaining her undergraduate degree, Nikki went on to receive her M.F.A. at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University, during which time she studied abroad at the Moscow Art Theatre School.

Since graduating, Nikki has been constantly writing or performing in some capacity: as an avid-self-producer, she garnered national news coverage for her viral music video, The Ivy League Hustle and co-wrote two Hollywood Fringe Best Musical nominees. Most recently Nikki has been producing and co-starring the original play she co-created, Definition of Man. As the show’s playwright, she advanced to one of 24 semi-finalists out of 374 submissions in The Playwrights Realm’s 2016-2017 Writing Fellows Program and received a nomination for the Inkwell Playwright’s Promise at the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival. The play integrates Nikki’s performative and intellectual sides, synthesizing academic texts on rhetoric, personal narratives, and acrobatic counterbalancing she first learned in Russia and has since studied with her partner under Cirque du Soleil veteran Tavi Stutz’s supervision to embody and explore the nature of the world as discursively formed. The show won Best in Dance and Physical Theatre as well as the Ripest Show award at Hollywood Fringe in 2017 and enjoyed a successful full run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018.

Nikki specializes as a tutor in writing, teaching her students how to research, organize and execute academic papers and has worked as a private aide to graduate students in Communications Studies. She is currently a member of Sacred Fools Theatre Company, is developing a tour for her show and continues multiple collaborative endeavors.