Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Serra Naiman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Serra, appreciate you joining us today. Do you manage your own social media?

I manage my own!
The whole social media thing was more or less an accident. When I started acting for film again in 2020, I had a casting director tell me that I was “not going to get cast in anything if [I] don’t have a social media following.” That was the last thing I wanted to hear. I was barely on social media at all; I had disabled my Facebook years ago, I had a tiny private instagram, and I had never even been on TikTok. So I begrudgingly opened a “professional” Instagram and I did not take it seriously at all – I just messed around and posted stuff that made me chuckle. But over time I slowly realized that it was a really useful way to showcase my comedy writing. After the pandemic hit and I left Chicago, I was missing live sketch and improv so much – social media turned out to be a way to scratch that itch.
The results have been all over the place! Sometimes the video I put the least effort into gets a million views, while the sketch I fully write out and put hours into editing gets almost nothing. It’s pure chaos and most days there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. I guess my insight is – the people who want to follow you will find you, and the people who are following you for the wrong reasons will leave, but it will all level out. Just keep putting up what YOU enjoy.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hello! I’m a comedy writer & actor!

I acted on stage all through high school and college. I had written a few comedic shorts/one acts throughout, but it wasn’t until my senior year that I realized I wanted that to be my focus. After graduating form SFSU, I stuck around the Bay Area and acted in a few local productions, produced a few sketch shows, interned with the SF Neofuturists, and wrote/filmed a few comedy shorts. I still didn’t feel like I was doing enough – I wanted to learn MORE, I wanted to be SURROUNDED by comedy, I wanted it to become my career – so naturally, I moved to Chicago.
For 5 years I took sketch writing and improv classes at The Second City, iO Chicago, The Den, and CiC. I usually refer to this phase as “grad school” because I learned just as much and it was just as expensive. I performed on multiple improv and sketch teams – doing live shows 5-6 nights a week up until the world shut down and I moved back to the Bay.
With the downtime, I focused in on turning all the stage comedy I’d written in Chicago into on-camera comedy. I slowly found a crew of new and talented friends and started filming sketches regularly for social media/YouTube.
Today I continue to maintain/post comedic bits on social media as a way to show my writing and performing style. I’ve more recently linked up with a good friend and co-writer Michael Saarela, we’ve completed a sketch show pilot and we’re currently focusing on putting up our sketches live in LA.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Well its just plain fun. It’s play. It’s love. All I do is play and come up with ways to make the people I love laugh. Ultimately, I’m a huge sap, and I believe that making other people laugh is an act of love.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I would say there’s less of a ‘goal’ or ‘mission’ to this all, and more a *need* to do it. A friend and fellow performer told me that she was once given the advice “if you can see yourself being happy doing anything other than acting, DO IT. If not, if you can only see yourself acting, keep acting.” That was the first time I’d heard articulated what I was starting to feel. I’d tried to force myself to have more stable career-based interests. I put years into gaining experience and taking classes to eventually become a preschool teacher. And don’t get me wrong, I loved working with kids, it was incredibly rewarding. But I constantly had the feeling that I was putting my energy into the wrong thing. I knew I wasn’t fully happy. And I was always thinking about the time I was losing that I could have put toward the scarier less stable career choice – comedy.
There’s no ‘goal’ or ‘end result’ to all this. It’s just what makes me happy.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @serra.naiman
• Youtube: @serranaiman9477

Image Credits

Chad A. Marshall
Gabby Battista