When Indian-American actress, comedian, screenwriter, and producer Mindy Kaling walked back onto Dartmouth‘s campus for the opening of the Mindy Kaling Theater Lab in October, it was a full-circle moment of returning to the place where her creative journey began. The Emmy-nominated writer, actor, and producer, best known for The Office and The Mindy Project, has gifted her alma mater a space designed to foster the kind of experimentation that shaped her own career.
Located in the Hopkins Center for the Arts, the Mindy Kaling Theater Lab offers students expanded rehearsal spaces and the capacity for concurrent productions. Its a a long-awaited resource for Dartmouth’s vibrant performing arts community. For Kaling, the lab is a creative incubator. “To this day, some of my greatest successes have been things that were at one point terrible,” she reflected. “I’m so happy that the space can be a workshop space for people.”
The new lab is deeply tied to Kaling’s personal and professional story. As a student, she was a member of the campus improv troupe, where she first began writing and performing her own material. Dartmouth, she says, was the birthplace of her “do-it-yourself” philosophy, and the determination to write, produce, and act in her own work. It was also where she learned the resilience that would later serve her in Hollywood, and help in figuring out how to face failure, laugh through it, and try again.
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In her conversation with media outlets, Kaling explained that she hopes the space encourages students to fail, improve, and discover their creative voices in a supportive environment. As someone who has built a career on originality and persistence, she wanted to create a space where others could do the same without fear of judgment or perfectionism. “I hope it gives students a place to put aside their ego to work on things and make it better,” she said.
The decision to donate the lab, Kaling noted, also carried a deeper personal significance. Coming from a family without generational wealth, she described the act of philanthropy itself as an unfamiliar but empowering step. “It feels like part of a world that people like me — children of immigrants — have been left out of, so that’s very new and exciting,” she shared.
For Kaling, Dartmouth remains woven into the fabric of her creative identity. Elements of campus life have found their way into her work from the character of Andy Bernard in The Office to the collegiate setting of The Sex Lives of College Girls. The college, she said, gave her the confidence to pursue her dreams in New York and Los Angeles.
Now, through the Mindy Kaling Theater Lab, she is returning that gift, and transforming the inspiration she once drew from Dartmouth into a legacy that will nurture generations of storytellers to come.