Background
Shlesinger was born in New York City and her family moved to Dallas, Texas when she was six months old.
Shlesinger was born in New York City and her family moved to Dallas, Texas when she was six months old.
She attended the private Greenhill School and participated on the school"s improvisation team She performed with ComedySportz Dallas and attended the University of Kansas for her freshman year.
She is Jewish. She also participated in Semester at Sea. She transferred to Emerson College in Boston, where she majored in film. After graduating from college, Shlesinger moved to Los Angeles to pursue stand-up comedy.
She has written for Heavy.com and had her own show on GOTV"s mobile network.
She appeared in The Last Comic Standing Tour. Shlesinger contributed to Surviving the Holidays with Lewis Black, a History Channel holiday special, and narrated the 2009 documentary Imagine lieutenant!² The Power of Imagination.
In 2010, she released an on-demand comedy video, Manitoba Up and Acting Like a Lady, and an on-demand comedy album, iliza Live, on her website, via The ConneXtion. Around the time of these releases, Shlesinger appeared in a business comedy video series for Slate.
Shlesinger hosted The Weakly News on TheStream.tv from July 7, 2007 to April 9, 2012.
She also hosted Excused, a syndicated American reality-based dating competition series, which ran from 2011 to 2013. She co-stars in the 2013 film Paradise. She began a podcast called Truth and Iliza in August 2014.
Featuring guest hosts, the weekly podcast is a forum for discussing things which bother Shlesinger and her friends, with punk theme song performed by Being Mean to Pixley.
Shlesinger"s first comedy album and video, War Paint, was recorded on December 1, 2012 at The Lakewood Theater in Dallas, Texas, and released on Netflix on September 1, 2013. Her second stand-up special, entitled Freezing Hot, was recorded in Denver, Colorado and premiered on Netflix in January 23, 2015.
She is the host of the Turner Broadcasting System comedy/game show Separation Anxiety, and was the winner of the sixth season of National Broadcasting Company"s Last Comic Standing and host of the syndicated dating show Excused. In 2007, Shlesinger won Myspace"s So You Think You"re Funny contest and has been featured as the G4 network"s Myspace Girl of the Week. In 2008, Shlesinger became the first woman, and the youngest, winner of National Broadcasting Company"s Last Comic Standing, in the series" sixth season. She was twice selected, by other comedians, to compete in the head-to-head eliminations, and won each time.
Her television credits include East! Network"s Forbes Celebrity 100, television Guide"s America"s Next Top Producer, Comedy Central Presents Season 14 Episode 18, John Oliver"s New York Stand Up Show, Byron Allen"s Comics Unleashed, and History Channel"s History of a Joke.
There, she was a member of the campus" comedy sketch group, Jimmy"s Traveling All Stars, and refined her writing and editing skills. She was one of the most popular members of the Whiteboy Comedy group of standup comedians in Los Angeles, which brought her to the stage at The Improv in Hollywood.
