Monika Smith

Smith's career in Los Angeles intersected with two distinct phases of the city's improv scene: the UCB-centered long-form community that built momentum through the 2000s and the Nerdist-driven comedy media expansion of the 2010s. Her Artistic Director role at Nerdist connected her to a venue that occupied an unusual position in Los Angeles comedy, bridging stage improv performance, podcast culture, and digital media production in ways that few other venues attempted. The Nerdist Theatre operated during a period when the Los Angeles improv landscape was expanding beyond UCB and Second City to include new institutional spaces, and Smith's leadership there contributed to shaping its programming identity.

Her work establishing improv training infrastructure in China represented an early effort to bring North American long-form pedagogy to a market that had no established tradition for the form. Writing curriculum for production companies across Asia, directing and performing there, and founding a training program for both long-form improv and sketch comedy extended the applied dimensions of improv training to contexts outside the traditional performance-school model. This international education work paralleled a broader movement in the 2010s as North American improv teachers began establishing programs in markets across Europe, South America, and Asia.

Smith's teaching practice emerged from her years performing and eventually serving as Artistic Director of UCB Los Angeles, the role through which she became the primary steward of the theater's training culture and performance standards on the West Coast.

Her pedagogical approach reflects the UCB game-based methodology at its core: scenes are understood as having an identifiable "game," which is the unusual but logical behavior that has been established in the scene's opening and which the performers commit to heightening. Smith's teaching emphasizes strong initiations that establish clear base realities, active listening that allows performers to recognize when the unusual thing has been introduced, and commitment to character logic that drives the game's escalation.

As Artistic Director, Smith extended her teaching influence beyond individual classes to the institutional level, shaping curriculum standards, faculty development, and the overall performance culture at UCB LA. Her dual background as both a stage improviser (UCB performer since 2007) and a television actress who has worked in scripted material gives her teaching a cross-platform awareness that connects stage technique to screen performance contexts. Her work with Second City's touring company and Hollywood stage company adds an additional reference point from the narrative and character-centered Chicago tradition, which she applies alongside the game-focused UCB framework to offer students a broader set of tools for developing their own performance identities.

Smith's curriculum development work for Second City Los Angeles and Nerdist, and especially her establishment of the first long-form improv and sketch training program in China, represents a documented contribution to the global spread of North American improv pedagogy. Her solo improv show at UCB's Teacher's Lounge stands as an unusual format achievement in a city where solo performance is uncommon and long-form solo improv is rarer still. Her more than 40 television credits document a career path from improv performance to sustained screen presence that represents one model of how UCB and Second City training translates to on-camera work. The curriculum she wrote for Second City Los Angeles, Nerdist, and acting schools across multiple US cities and internationally produced training materials used by performers who came up in those programs.