Liza Koshy was born Elizabeth Shaila Koshy on March 31, 1996, in Houston, Texas, the youngest of three daughters of Jose Koshy, an Indian Malayali petroleum industry executive, and Jean Carol Hertzler, a German-American yoga instructor, according to her Wikipedia biography. She grew up in Houston, attended Lamar High School where she was a member of the drill team, and enrolled at the University of Houston in 2014 to study business marketing. Koshy left college in 2015, only a year into her degree, to move to Los Angeles and pursue digital media full time, a decision that put her multilingual upbringing and early comfort on camera to immediate use.

Koshy began posting six-second comedy sketches to Vine in 2013 under the handle “Lizzza,” building a following through exaggerated facial expressions, rapid delivery, and a willingness to look ridiculous for a punchline. By the time Vine shut down in 2017 she had amassed roughly 7 million followers on the app, a base she had already begun funneling toward a YouTube channel launched alongside her Vine career, per Wikipedia. That crossover paid off quickly: Koshy became the fastest personality on the platform at the time to reach 10 million subscribers, a milestone hit by 2017 that showed her Vine-era fame was translating into a lasting YouTube audience rather than fading with the app that made her famous.

Koshy’s breakout ran through 2016 and 2017, when she landed her first credited acting roles alongside her growing subscriber count, including Aday Walker in Tyler Perry’s “Boo! A Madea Halloween” (2016) and Violet Adams in the Hulu drama series “Freakish” (2016-2017), along with a recurring role on YouTube Premium’s “Escape the Night” (2017-2019), according to her IMDb credits. She hosted MTV’s revived “Total Request Live” from 2017 to 2018 and fronted the network’s 2017 Golden Globes preshow, which drew 2.7 million Twitter viewers, a platform record at the time. Vogue also tapped her as the first digital-native star featured on its “73 Questions” interview series, marking her crossover from app-based comedy into mainstream entertainment press.

In June 2018, Koshy co-created, executive produced, and starred in “Liza on Demand” for YouTube Premium, playing gig-economy worker Liza Hertzler alongside co-creators Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the series. The show ran three seasons and 25 episodes through October 2021 and won Comedy Series at the 2018 Streamy Awards, with Koshy separately winning Acting in a Comedy. That same June, she began hosting Nickelodeon’s reboot of “Double Dare,” a run that earned her a Daytime Emmy nomination and continued through December 2019, as detailed by Bustle. She has since voiced Zipp Storm in “My Little Pony: A New Generation” (2021) and Arcee in “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” (2023), and appeared in Netflix’s “Work It” (2020) and 2025’s “The Naked Gun.”

Koshy’s move from creator to mainstream entertainer was formally recognized in 2019, when she made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for Hollywood & Entertainment and appeared on both TIME’s list of the 25 Most Influential People on the Internet and the inaugural TIME 100 Next list. Forbes’ own profile of her describes a “Digital Star” built on more than 16 million YouTube subscribers and 2.5 billion views at the time, spanning her “Double Dare” and “TRL” hosting work alongside “Freakish,” according to Forbes. Industry awards followed a similar arc: four Streamy Awards, four Teen Choice Awards, and a 2018 Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Funny YouTube Creator, a haul that reflects recognition from both the creator economy and traditional entertainment gatekeepers within a few years of each other.

Beyond acting and hosting fees, Koshy has built a reputation as an unusually effective pitchwoman: her campaign work for Beats Electronics reportedly drew four times the viewership of comparable celebrity ad campaigns, a figure cited in Celebrity Net Worth’s profile of her (a secondary source, since the underlying viewership data has not been independently published elsewhere). She has also been associated with plant-based food brand Beyond Meat and collaborated with jewelry company The Giving Keys on a necklace collection that supports people transitioning out of homelessness, pairing sponsorship income with a cause-driven angle rather than treating brand deals purely as advertising.

Koshy’s entrepreneurial streak predates her fame: she has described cutting up and reselling T-shirts for $20 apiece between classes in high school. That instinct scaled into her “Liza on Demand” role as co-creator and executive producer rather than hired talent, giving her a production credit and creative control beyond acting, per her IMDb profile. She also runs a direct-to-fan merchandise line sold largely through Instagram’s shoppable-post feature, and partnered with activewear retailer Fabletics on an exclusive co-designed collection, a deal reported as an exclusive by WWD. The Fabletics tie-up placed her alongside the retailer’s roster of celebrity-designed lines, extending her brand beyond video into a recurring retail product.

Koshy owns a roughly 3,000-square-foot modern home in Studio City, Los Angeles, reported as a $1.8 million purchase, according to real estate coverage from This Older House. The property includes four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, and a pool, with a contemporary design mixing stone and wood finishes and large windows connecting indoor and outdoor living space. Architectural Digest featured the home in a December 2023 video tour showing Koshy preparing for a holiday dinner party, walking through her seasonal decor and entertaining setup in the same residence, as shown in Architectural Digest’s video tour.