actor ✦ comedian ✦ director ✦ writer

Nicole Asava (she/her/they/them), formerly known as Nicole Pasquale, is a Brooklyn based Thai-Chinese-American queer actor, comedian, director, teacher, & writer from Anchorage, Alaska. They’ve done A LOT of improv and sketch at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCBT) in New York where they currently teach improvisation and at Second City in Chicago. In 2016 she was a NBC/UCBT Diversity Scholar finalist and has had the joy of performing in many NYC live comedy shows including Asian AF, the improvised This American Life, Jo Firestone’s Live Dubbed Sitcoms, Kaleidoscope, Dr. Brothers, and Crisis On Ski Mountain.

As a theatre director Nicole’s directed over two dozen comedy shows and plays with Boogiemanja, UCBT, and the Player’s Theater Short Play Festival. She’s made comedy videos for Elite Daily, MTV, Fuse, Broadway Video, College Humor, Scary Mommy, Betches, The Dad, and with millennial news and culture website Mic.com as a host for their daily news video series Mic Check. For over three years at UCBT they hosted the popular WOKE AF: A Mind-Opening Variety Show, an all-inclusive comedy show where artists and activists share social issues they're passionate about. In 2020 they took WOKE AF and transformed it into AMP to be a finalist in the Yes And Laughter Lab pitch program and the following year they performed and wrote for the Viacom CBS 2021 Showcase!

Today you can see Nicole on TV in the last season of Barry, as well as Younger, The Undoing, My Mom Your Dad, The Break with Michelle Wolf, in commercials, and some embarrassing things that she did for swag and doesn’t regret. On stage you can see them performing with Asian AF, the premier comedy variety spotlighting Asian American artists, whose next show is at The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. April 19th & 20th!