Mckenna Grace

Mckenna Grace (born June 25, 2006) is an American actress. Born in Grapevine, Texas, Grace began acting professionally at age five and relocated to Los Angeles, California, as a child. Her earliest roles included Jasmine Bernstein in the Disney XD sitcom Crash & Bernstein (2012–2014) and Faith Newman in the soap opera The Young and the Restless (2013–2015). After several small roles, she starred as a child prodigy in Gifted (2017), a breakthrough for which she received a nomination for the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer. Grace subsequently appeared in the films I, Tonya (2017), Captain Marvel (2019), and Troop Zero (2019). Journalists noted her as a scream queen following multiple projects in the horror genre, including The Bad Seed (2018), The Haunting of Hill House (2018), and Annabelle Comes Home (2019). For playing an abused teenager in The Handmaid's Tale (2021–2022), Grace was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, making her the first child recognized for a guest acting Emmy. She appeared in the supernatural comedy Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), earning critical praise and a Critics' Choice Super Award nomination. In 2022, Grace wrote, executive produced, and starred in The Bad Seed Returns, and portrayed Jan Broberg in A Friend of the Family. After signing with Photo Finish Records in 2020, Grace released her debut single, "Haunted House", in 2021, as part of the Ghostbusters: Afterlife soundtrack. She released two extended plays in 2023: Bittersweet 16, which explored pop rock, and Autumn Leaves. Early life Grace was born on June 25, 2006, in Grapevine, Texas, United States. She is the only child of Ross Burge, an orthopedic surgeon, and Crystal Grace, a medical sales representative. Grace has Mexican ancestry through a great-grandmother. As a young child, she lived in Dallas-Fort Worth. She trained in cheerleading, gymnastics, tap, and ballet; she also participated in beauty pageants, where she was crowned "Tiny Miss Texas". Grace has never gone to a regular school; she has been home-schooled and had on-set tutors. In 2017, Grace stated she was attending a creative writing workshop with other home-schooled students once a week. She took a college course on media aesthetics in 2021, in which she had to repeatedly write about The Handmaid's Tale without mentioning her own work on the show.