Haley Lu Richardson was born on March 7, 1995, in Phoenix, Arizona, into a childhood shaped by performance and physical expression. From 2001 to 2011, she was a leading dancer in Phoenix's Cannedy Dance Company, competing in theatrical productions and regional dance competitions throughout the Southwest. The discipline and bodily awareness of that decade-long training would inform the emotional physicality she brought to her acting work, even as her career took her far from the dance stage.
Her television career began in 2013, when she took a recurring role as Tess in the ABC Family supernatural drama Ravenswood. She also appeared as a guest on the Disney Channel sitcom Shake It Up and co-starred in ABC's pilot production "Adopted." That same year, she played Julina in the Lifetime original film Escape from Polygamy alongside Jack Falahee. These early roles established her presence in the television landscape without yet revealing the particular qualities that would distinguish her from her peers. In 2016, she took a recurring role as Ellie in the Freeform drama series Recovery Road, deepening her television experience.
Her early film work was similarly a time of accumulation rather than arrival. She appeared in The Last Survivors, and had supporting roles in two 2016 films that would eventually be regarded as significant: The Edge of Seventeen, the sharp coming-of-age drama directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, and Split, the psychological horror film directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Neither role was the lead, but both placed her in front of substantial audiences and demonstrated her ability to hold her own in demanding material.
The genuine turning point came in 2017, when she starred in Columbus opposite John Cho, in a film directed by Kogonada. Columbus is a deliberately quiet, intellectually precise film set in Columbus, Indiana, built around conversations about architecture, connection, and the difficulty of leaving home. Richardson's performance as Casey, a young woman drawn to a stranger while caring for her ailing mother, earned her a nomination for the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Actress. Richard Brody, reviewing the film for The New Yorker, wrote that Richardson "vaults to the forefront of her generation's actors with this performance, which virtually sings with emotional and intellectual acuity." The recognition was not merely promotional — it reflected a genuine critical consensus that a significant new screen presence had announced itself.
She followed Columbus with a series of projects in independent film. Support the Girls in 2018, Unpregnant in 2020, and After Yang in 2022 all demonstrated a deliberate preference for material that prioritized character and atmosphere over commercial formula, and a willingness to work with directors whose vision aligned with that preference. In 2019, she shifted briefly toward more mainstream romantic terrain in Five Feet Apart, opposite Cole Sprouse, playing a cystic fibrosis patient who falls in love with a boy afflicted with the same disease. The film reached a wide audience and expanded her public profile significantly.
The role that brought her to the widest possible audience came in 2022, when she joined the second season of the HBO anthology series The White Lotus as Portia, a restless young American adrift in Sicily. The series was a phenomenon of its moment, dissected by critics and viewers in equal measure, and Richardson's comic precision within the ensemble earned her considerable attention. That same year, she starred in the video for the Jonas Brothers' song "Wings," released in February 2023, and appeared in the romantic comedy film Love at First Sight.
In November 2025, Richardson published her first collection of poetry, I'm Sad and Horny, with Simon and Schuster, completing an identity that had always encompassed more than performance. Away from screens, she has crocheted since the age of eight and maintains an Etsy shop selling accessories and clothing of her own design. Her personal life has been part of her public presence as well: she began dating actor Brett Dier in 2012, after they met on the set of Ravenswood, and she proposed to him in 2019 under circumstances she described on the television program Busy Tonight as entirely unceremonious — over pizza, without a trace of formal romance. In 2022, she announced that the two had ended their engagement approximately two years earlier. Through all of it, she has remained one of the most consistently interesting screen actors of her generation, defined less by any single role than by a quality of attention she brings to all of them.
