Meredith Scardino is the creator and showrunner of the Netflix TV series Girls5eva. Born and raised outside of Philadelphia, from a young age, Meredith was encouraged by her parents to pursue all types of art, and tried everything from cartooning classes (and watching Saturday Night Live) to painting classes in high school. She earned a bachelors degree in fine arts from Cornell before moving to New York City to pursue a masters in painting from the Parsons School of Design. There, her world opened up, as she took improv classes and writing electives at Parsons alongside her painting classwork. Scardino then landed a job creating animated comedy shorts, which combined her love for painting with her growing talent for comedy writing. Soon, she decided she wanted to pursue comedy writing full-time and quickly landed a writing gig at VH1’s Best Week Ever. Stints at the Late Show With David Letterman and The Colbert Report followed before she jumped into narrative TV by working on The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In 2021, she created her own show, Girls5eva, about a one-hit-wonder girl group that gets a chance at redemption decades after their initial fame. This year, she’s nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series.