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In the 2021 Netflix satire The Chair, Sandra Oh plays the chair of an English department at a small New England liberal arts college who tries—and often fails, hilariously—to balance the competing demands of fellow faculty, administrators, students, and her personal life.

Now Oh will be on campus for real. The Golden Globe Award-winning star of Killing Eve and �Ұ����’s Anatomy will address the Class of 2025 and receive an honorary doctorate of arts at Commencement on Sunday, June 15.

“Sandra Oh is one of the most versatile, intelligent, funny, soulful, and boundary-pushing actors performing today, and I am so pleased to welcome her to Dartmouth,” says , who would not comment on the verisimilitude of The Chair’s representation of academia. 

Oh says she is looking forward to speaking at Commencement.

“I will finally fulfill my parents’ dream of me getting a(n honorary) university degree. I am the last in my family to do so, so phew,” she says. “But truly, it’s an honor and a responsibility I take seriously. It’s always a good thing to have to figure out what you want to say. And to have an audience of young people judge you for it.”

The daughter of Korean immigrants to Canada, Oh grew up outside of Ottawa and began acting in her early teens. What her family at first took as just a hobby soon emerged as her vocation. 

“They definitely did not expect me to be an actor, and early on did not want me to be an actor, for a lot of very good reasons,” Oh told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2004. “But, you know, sometimes you’re born without a choice. You have to become who you know you have to become. And that was the case for me.”

At the time of that interview, Oh had just played a memorable supporting role in the 2004 hit film Sideways and been cast as medical resident Cristina Yang on Shonda Rhimes ’91’s breakout show �Ұ����’s Anatomy, which premiered on ABC in 2005. 

Oh spent the next 10 years on �Ұ����’s and won a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actress in 2006. (Rhimes, a Dartmouth trustee, delivered the Commencement address in 2014.)

These roles, which helped launch Oh into stardom, were the culmination of years of carefully searching out fully realized characters that she could portray on screen, beyond Hollywood Asian stereotypes. 

A decade earlier, as a young graduate of the National Theater School of Canada, she had landed the title role of the Canadian TV movie The Diary of Evelyn Lau—a part that “established everything of who I am as an actor,” she told Vanity Fair in 2021—and won a Genie Award for best actress in Double Happiness, the first prominent feature film directed by a Chinese Canadian woman. 

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Sandra Oh, the Golden Globe Award-winning star of Killing Eve and �Ұ����’s Anatomy, will address the Class of 2025 and receive an honorary doctorate of arts at Commencement. (Photo by Emily Shur)

Her turn toward comedy came when she was cast as personal assistant Rita Wu on the HBO series Arli$$, a role she has said helped expand her physicality as an actor. She also played the much-memed Vice Principal Gupta in the 2001 film The Princess Diaries. 

“Comedy is the equalizer,” she told Stephen Colbert in 2024. “It’s the clearest way for you to not only entertain, but to break people’s hearts. Right on the edge of comedy is tragedy.”

That tragicomic edge is exactly what Oh explored in Killing Eve as an MI5 bureaucrat obsessed with finding a cold-blooded assassin named Villanelle. “The Frankenstein crazy-quilt nature of Oh’s performance in Killing Eve is what puts her over the top as the best actress on television,” wrote critic Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture, which awarded Oh best actress honors in 2018.

The winner of four Screen Actors Guild Awards, Oh has more recently starred in the 2021 horror film Umma, the 2023 Emmy Award-winning comedy film Quiz Lady (which she co-produced), and the 2024 HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer.

She is currently executive producer and star of the independent film Can I Get a Witness, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and will appear in Aziz Ansari’s upcoming film Good Fortune.

She has also voiced several animated characters, hosted Saturday Night Live, and on Sesame Street. On stage last year, Oh performed in the Off-Broadway production of The Welkin at New York’s The Atlantic Theatre. This summer, she will play Olivia in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, alongside Peter Dinklage, Lupita Nyong’o, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

�鶹��Ƶ her upcoming speech at Commencement, Oh also says, “Higher education is and should be a place where you are safe and free to find out who you are, what you believe, what inspires you, and how you can use the privilege of education to serve.”

President Beilock will also deliver valedictory remarks at the ceremony. In addition to conferring degrees on undergraduate and professional and graduate students of the Class of 2025, Beilock will confer honorary degrees on several individuals, including Oh, who have made major contributions in their respective fields. The honorary degree recipients will be announced soon.

Commencement Dates to Know 

Saturday, May 10

9 a.m. , Lebanon Opera House, Lebanon, N.H. , 14th Surgeon General of the United States, will deliver the keynote address. 

Saturday, June 7

10 a.m. , Tuck Hall steps. The keynote speaker will be , president of business operations, Baltimore Orioles.

Friday, June 13

2 p.m. , Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center Lawn. The keynote speaker is , chief medical officer of ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University.

Saturday, June 14

9:30 a.m. , Dartmouth Green. Former Dartmouth provost and former Thayer dean Joseph Helble, president of Lehigh University, .

10 a.m. Senior Class Day, the Bema. 

2 p.m. Baccalaureate, a multifaith, multicultural celebration for graduates and their families, Rollins Chapel.

4 p.m. on the Green. Reception to follow on the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center Lawn. 

Sunday, June 15

9 a.m. Academic procession to the Green. The Commencement ceremony begins at 9:30 a.m.