Midori Francis

Midori Iwama (born April 16, 1994), known professionally as Midori Francis, is an American actress. She began her career in theatre, earning NYIT, Obie, and Drama Desk Awards. She received a Daytime Emmy nomination for her role as Lily in the Netflix series Dash & Lily (2020). Francis grew up in Rumson, New Jersey. She is the daughter of Joanne and Ken Iwama, the current chancellor of Indiana University Northwest. Named after her paternal grandmother, Francis is of Japanese descent on her father's side and Irish and Italian on her mother's. On growing up in a predominantly white town in the 90s and early 2000s, she commented "I was teased a lot for being Asian, I was bullied, made to feel like I was ugly or weird". She identifies as Hapa (a term for people of mixed European and Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry). Francis attended Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School, graduating in 2009. She went on to obtain a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2014. She studied abroad in London, training with Tim Carroll and performing The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare's Globe.