As Conan O’Brien takes the stage to host the Oscars 2026, his second year in a row, his wife is supportive of him. When he hosted the 2025 show, his wife stood by his side. Here’s all about his wife Liza Powel O’Brien.
What is Liza Powel O’Brien’s profession?
Liza Powel is a playwright and television host, and has written at least 12 plays over the course of her career. Liza has a master of fine arts degree (MFA) in fiction writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She also earned a bachelor’s degree at Vassar College in New York, which served as the inspiration and subject of her 2019 play, ‘The Great Experiment.’ According to her official site, the play was set in 1865, four years after Vassar was established, with the following premise: “Freshman year means new horizons, questionable decisions, toxic friendship and epic culture clashes. At the radically progressive ‘first female college,’ it also marks the birth (of) a whole new era.”
Liza Powel O’Brien has written a dozen of plays
Liza is an accomplished playwright who has written at least a dozen plays, each developed and presented at venues like the Geffen Playhouse, the Blank Theatre, Unscreened LA, the Lark Theatre and Ojai Playwrights Conference.Beyond The Great Experiment, her work has included Ruthie Goes Shopping, John Wayne Times, The Distinguished Gentleman and Lucky, to name a few. Her full-length play, Apostrophe, was first presented during the 2020 Ojai Playwright’s Conference. It premiered on June 10, 2022, at Whidbey Island Center for the Arts in Langley, Wash.
How did Liza Powel meet Conan O’Brien?
Liza was a copywriter for the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding when she first met Conan in 1999. The agency was tapped to do a remote segment for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, where they worked with their “worst advertisers” to give them a commercial makeover. Liza was part of the team that worked on a commercial for Hilton Furniture. Conan visited the agency’s offices, where he met Liza and the rest of the FCB team, and as the talk show host tells it, he fell for her right away. “Somewhere, in the vault at NBC, there’s footage of me literally falling for my wife on camera,” Conan said of their meeting during a 2012 interview with Piers Morgan.
Liza Powel married Conan O’Brien in 2002
Conan and Liza tied the knot in the bride’s hometown of Seattle on January 12, 2002, at the St. James Cathedral. The couple welcomed their first child, daughter Neve, on October 14, 2003. According to Neve’s LinkedIn, she has been a student at Yale University since 2022 and is expected to graduate in 2026. Liza had their second child, son Beckett, on Nov. 9, 2005.
Liza Powel hosted ‘Significant Others’ podcast
Liza hosted, narrated and wrote episodes for the Significant Others podcast on her husband’s podcast network, Team Coco. The nonfiction podcast “tells the story of a talented, difficult and little-known individual who altered the destiny of their better-known partner, child, sibling or friend and impacted the world they left behind,” per the show’s description.
