Heather Elizabeth Langenkamp is an American actress, writer, director, disc jockey, and producer. Although she has acted in many film genres, she is primarily known for her work in horror films, in addition to her work on television sitcoms. Langenkamp has been referred to as a scream queen and was inducted into the Fangoria Chainsaw Hall of Fame in 1995.

Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while working for the Tulsa Tribune at the age of 18, she appeared as an extra in the Francis Ford Coppola productions The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983); while attending Stanford University, she played her first leading role in the little-seen Nickel Mountain (1984). Her breakthrough role was as the resourceful 15-year-old heroine Nancy Thompson in Wes Craven’s slasher film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)—the first film in the franchise of the same name. She reprised her role as Nancy in the third film and appeared as a fictionalized version of herself in the meta film Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994). Langenkamp has worked on two documentary films; executive producing and narrating Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010), which focuses on the making of all of the Nightmare films; and starring in and producing I Am Nancy (2011), which centers on the legacy of Nancy.

Langenkamp has also appeared in the films The Butterfly Room (2012), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and My Little Pony: A New Generation (2021). On television, she has appeared in Growing Pains (1988-1990), Just the Ten of Us (1988-1990), Perversions of Science (1997), and the Mike Flanagan Netflix series The Midnight Club (2022). Since the 2010s, Langenkamp has worked as a disc jockey for the Malibu radio station KBUU-LP, going under the pseudonym Sandy Bottoms. She wrote and directed the short film Washed Away (2019).

Langenkamp met her husband, Oscar-winning make-up artist David LeRoy Anderson, at a wrap party for Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and together they run the make-up FX firm AFX Studio; where she has worked as a special make-up effects coordinator for films such as Dawn of the Dead (2004), Cinderella Man (2005), Evan Almighty (2007), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012).