Cynthia Nixon is an Emmy®, Tony® and Grammy® Award winner, who has been acting professionally since the age of 12 in film, television, and theatre. A lifelong New Yorker, she has been a longtime activist for better funding for public schools, abortion rights, and LGBTQ equality. In 2018 Nixon ran for Governor of New York State. Her campaign successfully placed issues of racial, economic and gender inequality front and center and received half a million votes, the most votes ever for a Democratic primary challenger in New York or elsewhere.
Nixon is best known as Miranda Hobbes in HBO’s celebrated series Sex in the City, a role that garnered her the first of her two Emmy Awards. She then went on to co-star in the two wildly successful Sex and the City films. The show’s sequel And Just Like That… , for which she also serves as an Executive Producer, returned for its highly anticipated second season on June 22. In the first season, Nixon took on the role of director for the sixth episode titled “Diwali” and directed two episodes for the second season. Nixon will be returning for season 2 of HBO’s The Gilded Age later this year, a series created by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes, where she stars opposite Christine Baranski.
Nixon made her Broadway debut at 14 in The Philadelphia Story, (Theatre World Award.) She has appeared in over 40 plays, 13 on Broadway and has earned four Tony nominations, winning for David Lindsay Abaire’s Rabbit Hole and Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. She has directed three stage plays— Rasheeda Speaking at The New Group, (which received Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations), Steve, (The New Group) and MotherStruck!, a one woman play written by and starring Staceyann Chin.
In 2021, Nixon joined Jane Lynch, Bowen Yang and Abbi Jacobson to lend her voice for Adam Goldman’s hilarious queer podcast Hot White Heist. The podcast was directed by Alan Cumming.
Previously, Nixon starred in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Ratched as ‘Gwendolyn Briggs’ opposite Sarah Paulson role as Gwendolyn, Cynthia garnered a Golden Globe Award nomination for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.” The Golden Globe Award nominated series was the streamer’s best new original launch of the year 2020.
Nixon has appeared in many films, including Stray Dolls, Sonejuhi Sinha’s celebrated feature debut about undocumented immigrants and the dark side of the American dream, Amadeus, Little Darlings, and Terrence Davies’ A Quiet Passion in which she played reclusive poet Emily Dickinson. Her performance garnered widespread acclaim, including being chosen by The New York Times Magazine as one of the 10 Best Actors of the Year in 2017, with A.O. Scott calling her portrayal “one of the most plausible and powerful depictions of genius ever committed to film.” In 2015, she co-starred in Josh Mond’s James White opposite Christopher Abbott, a film that won The Best of Next Audience Award at Sundance and earned Nixon an Independent Spirit Award nomination. In 2009, Nixon was awarded the Best Spoken Word Grammy for her recording of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
She narrated the documentary short Tailing Pond which investigates the horrifying effects of uranium extraction on the health of the indigenous population of Jadugora, Jharkhand in East India, where thousands of children are falling ill and dying from radioactive waste pollution. Saurav Vishnu’s award-winning documentary short is being expanded into a six-part documentary series, which Nixon is involved with.
Nixon lives in New York City with her wife Christine Marinoni. They have three children: Sam, Charlie and Max.