Janet Roth is a Ukrainian-American stand-up comedian and actor who grew up in a family of engineers but chose a much less predictable path — making people laugh. Born in Ukraine to a Ukrainian-Armenian family, she spent part of her teenage years studying in Germany before immigrating to the United States, picking up languages, accents, and plenty of material along the way.
Her love for performing started at age eight when she was cast as a witch in Goethe’s Walpurgis Night — an experience that sparked a lifelong fascination with the stage. Janet later earned her degree from DePaul University and went on to appear in the film Beyond the Trophy and the TV series Scorpion.
A series of unexpected life events eventually pushed Janet into stand-up comedy, where audiences embraced her sharp, extremely analytical perspective on life — which later became her 2021 comedy special Extremely Analytical on Amazon. Fluent in Ukrainian, Russian, and German, Janet often performs with accents and international observations and has shared the stage with comedians like Tiffany Haddish, Craig Robinson, Maz Jobrani, Dean Delray, Jeff Dye and many more.
Today she often performs as her alter ego Valentina Brainova — a blunt post-Soviet truth-teller created as Janet’s comedic response to Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine. Valentina is essentially a Soviet Karen: part cultural commentator, part unsolicited life coach. Imagine the estranged daughter of Borat Sagdiyev — a former Playboy Bunny turned locally famous remote colonoscoper who gives eccentric advice about modern life, relationships, and America while applying very old-world logic to very new problems https://womensinsider.com/finding-valentina-how-a-fictional-soviet-woman-gave-me-my-voice-back/
