Anna Konkle has one substantial work to her name, PEN15 (2019), in which she plays herself at thirteen among real children and never once winks. It is good enough to make us want a second, and so far there is not one.
Fi1m perspective
Anna Kone stands tall and stooped, hair tucked behind both ears, apologising before she has finished a sentence. That posture is most of what Anna Konkle does, and it turns out to be enough to build a series on. In PEN15 (2019) she and Maya Erskine play thirteen-year-old versions of themselves starting middle school, and every other child on screen is an actual child. The title admits the gimmick before you have pressed play. It holds because neither woman is joking, and Konkle in particular plays Anna stooped and sorry, as if apologising were a way of standing.
There is not much career around it. Konkle trained in experimental theatre at NYU, did student films and small television parts from 2013, and spent two seasons in the main cast of Rosewood (2015–2017), which we have not reviewed. Then PEN15, which she created with Erskine and Sam Zvibleman, wrote and starred in, and on which she directed for the first time in the second season in 2021. Since the series ended she has taken guest and supporting acting roles and published a memoir, The Sane One (2026), which goes further into the family material the show only touched.
The show is funny in the way that makes you hold a cushion in front of your face, and then, more often than we expected, it stops being funny and simply hurts. What did it to us was the apologising. Konkle plays a girl who says sorry before anything has gone wrong, and around the fourth time it stopped being a joke about adolescence and became the thing itself. She has a word for the mix, "tramedy", and has said that the show validated a wish to write about "things that make me uncomfortable, secrets, shame, and finding the comedy in it". That is an accurate description of the method. Melissa Walker's butterfly clips and low-riding jeans, worn as best clothes, and Taj Cross's Sam among the real children do the rest, and the directors, Zvibleman and Andrew DeYoung among them, are careful about where adult hands and mouths go whenever a scene turns to kissing.
It does not all hold. Ten episodes on one idea is a lot, and two or three of them are sketches stretched to length. The reviews have been warm almost without exception, but even admirers note that the premise is narrow and personal and that the second season goes darker, and we would say the darker stretches are where Konkle's writing is surest. As for the directing credit that puts her on this page: it arrived late, on a house style already set by Zvibleman, and we could not tell you which frames are hers.
So there is, on the evidence, a writer and a performer with one subject and one good vehicle for it, and a director only by the credits. Whether she can do this about anyone other than herself, or from behind the camera alone, has not yet been tried on screen. We would watch the attempt.
Biography
Anna Konkle is an American actress, writer and director. She was born on 7 April 1987 in Randolph, Vermont. She studied at New York University, where she began working on student films and experimental theatre. Early television roles included appearances in New Girl (2011) and Shameless (2011).
Konkle co-created the Hulu series PEN15 (2019–2021) with Maya Erskine and Sam Zvibleman. She also wrote, directed and starred in it as Anna Kone. The series earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Other credits include a main role in Rosewood (2015–2017) and appearances in Hacks (2021) and The Afterparty (2022). In 2026 she published the memoir The Sane One.
