Biography
Emily Vance Gordon was born in 1979 in Winston-Salem, NC. Upon enrollment in University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1997, Gordon pursued a major in psychology, accruing a Bachelor's degree therein, followed by a Master's of Science in Education in couple's counseling in 2003. Over the six years to follow, Gordon practiced therapy professionally, first in North Carolina, then in Chicago, IL, where she met and began a romantic relationship with then-aspiring comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani. In 2007, Gordon was diagnosed with Still's disease and placed into a medically induced coma for eight days, an experience that would inspire her first screenplay a decade later. Following this episode, Gordon and Nanjiani moved to New York City, where they married, and then to Los Angeles, at which point she eschewed her standing psychotherapy practice to pursue a career as a writer. She began contributing to publications including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and The Atlantic, among many others; around the same time, she and Nanjiani, along with comedian Jonah Ray, began producing a weekly live performance hosted at Los Angeles' Meltdown Comics. The popularity of the show earned Gordon the attention of entertainer and Nerdist CEO Chris Hardwick, who hired her in 2011 to serve as program director of the regular live performance Nerdist Showroom; the project also earned the attention of Comedy Central, which launched the television series "The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail" (Comedy Central 2014-16), which featured the irrepressibly perky Gordon in her backstage role as the show's producer and manager. During production of the program, Gordon and Nanjiani collaborated on their first feature screenplay "The Big Sick" (2017), which chronicled their romantic relationship and Gordon's experiences with the aforementioned medically-induced coma.
