Janina Gavankar

Janina Gavankar is an American actress and musician who studied piano, voice, and orchestral percussion and majored in theater at the University of Illinois Chicago. Born in Joliet, Illinois, she joined The L Word as a series regular in 2006, playing Papi Torres, and later took roles as Shiva on The League, Luna Garza on True Blood, McKenna Hall on Arrow, Diana Thomas on Sleepy Hollow, and Qetsiyah on The Vampire Diaries. She voiced Nikki in Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey (2010) and appeared in Blindspotting (2018) and The Vanishing of Sidney Hall (2018). In video games she played Iden Versio in Star Wars: Battlefront II, Amita in Far Cry 4, and Kiran Estevez in Alan Wake 2. Her music work includes a cover of Love Lockdown, the group Endera, and the single Waiting for Godot. In 2008 she earned an Asian Excellence Award nomination, and a 2012 Gravity Summit honor recognized her social media work.