Biography

Saki Miata is a bilingual actress fluent in both Japanese and English and known for quickly mastering foreign accents. Born and raised in Japan, Saki moved to Michigan at the age of fifteen and graduated from the University of Michigan. Saki's acting career began at the Bungakuza Theatre Institute in Tokyo, where she played Emily in Our Town, before returning to the U.S. to pursue on-screen roles.

Saki made her TV debut in the South Park episode 'Chinpokomon,' portraying a live-action character within the animated show. She has since appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm and Wasteland, and currently plays the recurring role of Ms. Kim, a North Korean landlord, on UrbanFlix TV's Cocaine Sisters.

Her performances have received recognition at several film festivals. In 2020, Saki won the Best Actress Bronze Award from the Los Angeles Independent Shorts Awards for her role as Liu, a Chinese garbage sorter, in the thriller short ROOM 3. The following year, she was nominated for Best Actress at the International Black and Diversity Film Festival for her role as Aki, a Japanese-American nursery owner, in the feature film Hank and Jolene. Most recently, in 2024, she played one of four major roles in the award-winning short film The Caregiver, which earned 11 awards, including the Best Ensemble Cast Platinum Award at the Independent Shorts Awards.

Saki remains passionate about the theatre and has performed in the musical "Paquito's Christmas" at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and Letters to Eve at the Miles Memorial Theater in Santa Monica, California. She was also a member of The Garage Theatre Company which produced the ensemble play Blood, written and directed by the late award-winning director Robert Allan Ackerman.

For voice-over work, Saki voiced the character Vy Le in the English dubbing of the Japanese TV anime series The Reflection (co-created by Stan Lee and Hiroshi Nagahama), available on Crunchyroll.com.

As an announcer, Saki anchored JATV News for 5 years, covering topics of interest to the Japanese and Japanese-American communities in Southern California and Hawaii. She has also launched her own YouTube channel, American English AHA!, where she shares her method of training the mouth to speak American English with a Japanese audience.

Saki's appetite to advance her acting skills never ends. She participates in workshops at the Detroit Repertory Theatre and takes online courses at the Pearlman Acting Academy. In the past in Los Angeles, she has studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, Expressions Unlimited, the Ruskin School of Acting, and the Speiser/Sturges Acting Studio.

Beyond the entertainment work, Saki is a dialect coach in Japanese and English and a professional translator and interpreter. She is also a certified International Sake Sommelier.

- IMDb mini biography by: Saki