Jean Yoon

Jean Yoon is an actress and writer of Korean descent with American and Canadian citizenship, raised in Toronto after being born in Champaign, Illinois. She entered theater in the early 1980s, left acting out of frustration and finished a degree at the University of Toronto before returning in 1995 with her own company, Loud Mouth Asian Babes, which staged plays she wrote about the Korean diaspora. Small television roles in the early 2000s, among them La Femme Nikita and Witchblade, led to wider notice in 2006 for her portrayal of Betty Ong in The Path to 9/11, and she earned a Gemini Award nomination for the mini-series Dragon Boys. Later credits include Dr. Montague in The Time Traveller's Wife (2009), Remedy, Peg+Cat, The Expanse and Orphan Black. She originated the family matriarch Umma on stage in 2011 and played her across five seasons of the CBC sitcom Kim's Convenience, winning an ACTRA Award and a Canadian Screen Award.