Moon Ga Young | 문가영 | About

Moon Ga Young was born in Karlsruhe to Korean parents who had met as students in Germany, and the family moved back to Korea in 2005, while she was in her third year of primary school. She still speaks German and English, plays the piano and the flute, and trained in ballet. She modelled as a child from 2005 and made her acting debut the following year in the film "Bloody Reunion", working steadily through her school years — "Shadows in the Palace" and "Our Town" (2007), then "Killer Toon" (2013), which got her noticed, and the KBS weekend drama "Wang's Family" the same year. She sat her college entrance exams in November 2014 and started at Sungkyunkwan University that January, reading theatre and film.

"Heartstrings" (2011) and the web drama "EXO Next Door" (2015) came in between, and from there the leads: "Don't Dare to Dream" (2016), "Live Up to Your Name" (2017), and "Tempted" (2018), which won her an Excellence Award for an actress in a Monday-Tuesday drama at the MBC Drama Awards. She led "Find Me in Your Memory" (2020), taking a Best Couple prize with Kim Dong Wook, then "True Beauty" (2020) as the schoolgirl who learns to remake her own face after years of being bullied for it — the part that made her known well beyond Korea. "Link: Eat, Love, Kill" and "The Interest of Love" followed in 2022, "My Dearest Nemesis" in 2025, and "Once We Were Us" brought her Best Actress at the 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards.

She published her first prose collection, "Pata", in February 2024. Its pre-sale took two thousand copies and went to a second printing at once, and the rights sold to Taiwan and Indonesia. She gave a hundred million won of the proceeds to the Ewha Womans University Medical Center that August, and fifty million more in February 2026 towards medical and self-reliance work for women and children in Tulum. She has been a goodwill ambassador for Plan Korea since 2017, and a global ambassador for Dolce & Gabbana since November 2023.