Lela Lee
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Lela Lee (born 1974 in Los Angeles, California) is an American actress and cartoonist, and the creator of the comic strip and animated cartoons Kim, the Angry Little Asian Girl and Angry Little Girls.
Lee, the youngest of four children, spent her earliest years being raised on a chicken farm by her grandparents in Korea. A few years later, she joined her family in suburban San Dimas, and cites her traditional Korean upbringing while growing up in an area with few other Asian Americans as a central influence in her work.
Angry Little Girls was developed from Kim, the Angry Little Asian Girl, a character she developed in 1994 when she was a sophomore at UC Berkeley. She developed the character after attending Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation with a friend. In an interview, she said, "I came out of there, I was really mad. And I said, 'I did not enjoy any of those cartoons. They were all making fun of colored people or ethnic people, and they were sexist and even though it's a cartoon, it's still not funny to me.'"
Four years after initially creating the character, she created four more cartoons, and sent the five episodes to festivals where they were well-reviewed by critics. She added more characters, including Deborah the disenchanted princess, Maria the crazy little Latina, Wanda the fresh little soul sistah, and Xyla the gloomy girl, and turned it into another weekly comic strip. In 2005, a collection of the Angry Little Girls strips was published.
She is also a film and television actress, with roles in the 1998 film Yellow and the 2002 film Better Luck Tomorrow. She starred in the short-lived Sci Fi Channel series Tremors, and had a recurring guest role on NBC's Scrubs.
