Yael Stone (born 6 March 1985) is an Australian actress. She has worked extensively in Australian theatre and has won two Sydney Theatre Awards. Outside of Australian theatre, she is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Lorna Morello in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black.
Stone was born and raised in Sydney, the daughter of Judy, a nurse, and Harry Stone, an architect. Stone is Jewish and her father is from Czechoslovakia. Her brother, Jake Stone, is the lead singer of the band Bluejuice. Her sister, Elana Stone, is also a musician.
Stone began acting as a child, with roles in the film Me Myself I and the miniseries The Farm. She worked primarily in theatre; at the 2008 Sydney Theatre Awards, she won the awards for Best Newcomer and Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Kid. She also worked in television, including supporting roles in All Saints and Spirited. From 2010 to 2011, she appeared in The Diary of a Madman, a role for which she was again nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Sydney Theatre Awards. In February 2011, she traveled to New York to perform in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's production of The Diary of a Madman, before returning to lead roles in A Golem Story, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and As You Like It in Sydney.
Stone moved to New York permanently in December 2011 and co-founded an experimental theatre company. After four months in New York, she was cast in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, a show set in a women's prison. Stone plays Lorna Morello, a prisoner from New Jersey; her accent, a mixture of Brooklyn and Boston, was called "the most amazing accent on television" by a journalist for The New Republic, while another reviewer deemed the role to be Stone's "breakout turn". She reprised her role in the show's second season, and was billed as a series regular in the third season.