Michele Merkin

Michele Merkin is an American former model and television host who was born on June 25, 1975, in Santa Clara County, California. She is best known for her fifteen-year modeling career appearing in major fashion magazines and television commercials, as well as her work hosting a variety of reality television shows and network programs during the 2000s.

Merkin was raised as the youngest of four children and is of Swedish and Russian Jewish descent. She attended a boarding school in England during her youth. Her mother was a model for twenty years and appeared in the debut Victoria's Secret catalog in 1977. By the age of 14, Merkin had reached a height of 5 feet 11 inches, which aided her in playing basketball but also led to taunting from classmates who gave her nicknames such as "Giraffa" and "Manute Bol."

Merkin began her modeling career part-time at the age of 15 while enrolled in high school. Over a modeling career that spanned 15 years, she lived in Paris, Milan, New York, and Los Angeles. During this period, she appeared in notable print fashion magazines including ELLE, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue. She was also featured in more than 60 commercial campaigns.

Her notable commercial work included advertisements for Clairol and the Nintendo video game Perfect Dark. For the Perfect Dark campaign, Merkin represented the lead video game character Joanna Dark across television commercials and in-store promotions for the Nintendo 64 cartridge, requiring her to cut her hair short and dye it black. Recognizing her modeling presence, Maxim magazine named her to its "Hot 100" list in both 2006, where she ranked at number 74, and 2007, where she ranked at number 56.

In June 2005, Merkin expanded into television hosting by co-hosting the Style Network reality series Foody Call alongside Rossi Morreale, a program focusing on romance and cooking that became the network's second highest rated show. Concurrently, starting in July 2005, she served as a sideline reporter for the third season of Extreme Dodgeball on the Game Show Network.

Merkin went on to host several other television projects over the following years. She hosted the ABC series The Next Best Thing in May 2007 and the Travel Channel special Sand Blasters III: The Extreme Sand Sculpting Championship in March 2008. From 2008 to 2009, she co-hosted the E! reality competition series Party Monsters Cabo. Additionally, Merkin hosted individual episodes of numerous series, including E! News Daily, NBC's For Love or Money, VH1's Red Eye, The Movie Fan Show, The Love Report, Close-up Hollywood, Buy TV, Movie Watch, and Attack of the Show!.

In her personal life, Merkin married Gateway, Inc. co-founder Ted Waitt in 2011.