Malia Obama Reveals New Stage Name

Barack and Michelle Obama’s oldest daughter is ditching her famous last name. As the 25-year-old embarks on her career in Hollywood with her latest short film, The Heart, Malia Obama revealed her official stage name in the Sundance Institute’s “Meet the Artist” spotlight video, which introduced her as filmmaker Malia Ann.

In what appears to be an attempt to distance herself from her parents, and perhaps any nepo-baby discussions, Malia has completely dropped “Obama” from her pen name. She has instead opted to use her middle name, Ann, for her Hollywood new moniker. The budding filmmaker has not publicly spoken about her stage name, or the decision to distance herself from her famous parents, who have also launched careers in entertainment with Higher Ground Productions, at this time.

Malia debuted her stage name as her short film, The Heart,produced by Donald Glover’s company Gilga, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah on Jan. 18. Following a grieving son whose mother left him with an unusual request in her will, Malia described the film in a Jan. 17 YouTube video as a film, which marks her directorial debut, “about lost objects and lonely people and forgiveness and regret, but I also think it works hard to uncover where tenderness and closeness can exist in these things.”She described it as “an odd little story, somewhat a fable, about a man grieving the death of his mother after she leaves him an unusual request.”

The project marked Malia’s latest credit in Hollywood. After first interning on HBO’s Girls and at Harvey Weinstein’s production company, per Hello! Magazine, Malia went on to work as a staff writer on Donald Glover’s Amazon Prime series Swarm. Glover later told Vanity Fair in 2022 of Malia, “Her writing style is great. She’s just like, an amazingly talented person. She’s really focused, and she’s working really hard.” He added: “I feel like she’s just somebody who’s gonna have really good things coming soon.”

As Malia and Glover maintained their close working relationship, with The Heart marking one of the first projects produced by Glover’s company Gilga, he told GQ of her film debut, “The first thing we did was talk about the fact that she will only get to do this once. You’re Obama’s daughter. So, if you make a bad film, it will follow you around.”