Tracey Wigfield

Early life

Raised in Wayne, New Jersey, Wigfield attended Catholic schools through high school. She graduated in 2001 from the all-girls Immaculate Heart Academy in Washington Township, Bergen County, New Jersey.

As a child, she used her parents' video camera to record comedy skits together with a friend. Wigfield graduated from Boston College, a Catholic university founded by the Jesuits, in 2005, where she majored in theater and English.

Career

After graduating, Wigfield took an internship at CNN, then transferred to the page program at Late Show with David Letterman. She was then a production assistant on the short-lived television sitcom Knights of Prosperity. She has written for and performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade. Tina Fey hired Wigfield at the age of 23 as a staff writer on 30 Rock after convincing her to submit a sample of her writing skills. She moved up to lead writer and then producer.

Wigfield and Fey did much of the writing for the series finale of 30 Rock and the two went on to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for the episode, which aired on January 31, 2013. After her work on 30 Rock, Jack Burditt brought her to California to write for The Mindy Project, which she and Mindy Kaling were co-executive producers. She appeared on the show as Dr. Lauren Neustadter. Wigfield created the NBC sitcom Great News, of which Fey is an executive producer. The series follows a producer at a news station whose mother begins an internship at the company.

Personal life

Wigfield was raised Roman Catholic and today describes herself as a "Sorta Catholic." In a 2017 America magazine piece, she described being Catholic as "not a huge part of my deal... I practice what I call “Chipotle Catholicism”: I go down the line picking and choosing the parts of Catholicism that appeal to me (charity, Pope Frank, spooky stories about saints) in order to create a custom-made spiritual burrito."