List of Famous people born in Nebraska, United States of America

Brad William Henke is an American actor and former National Football League and Arena Football League player. He is best known for his role as prison guard Desi Piscatella on Orange Is The New Black, for which he won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2016.

Joseph Robert Kerrey is an American politician who served as the 35th Governor of Nebraska from 1983 to 1987 and as a United States Senator from Nebraska from 1989 to 2001. Before entering politics, he served in the Vietnam War as a United States Navy SEAL officer and was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in combat. During the action for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor, he was severely wounded, precluding further naval service.

Reed Morano is an American cinematographer and director. Morano was the first woman in history to win both the Emmy and Directors Guild Award for directing a drama series in the same year for the pilot episode of The Handmaid's Tale. Morano is known for her cinematography on feature films such as Frozen River (2008), Kill Your Darlings (2013) and The Skeleton Twins (2014).

Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry.

Caril Ann Fugate is the youngest female in United States history to date to have been tried for first-degree murder. She was the adolescent girlfriend of spree killer Charles Starkweather, being just 14 years old when his murders took place in 1958. She was convicted as his accomplice and sentenced to life imprisonment, and was paroled after 17 years in 1976.

Shon Robert Hopwood is an American appellate lawyer and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Hopwood became well-known as a jailhouse lawyer who served time in prison for bank robbery. While in prison, he started spending time in the law library, and became an accomplished United States Supreme Court practitioner by the time he left in 2009.

James Burgon Valentine is an American musician and songwriter. He is the lead guitarist and backing vocalist for the pop rock band Maroon 5.

Peter George Peterson was an American investment banker who served as United States Secretary of Commerce from February 29, 1972, to February 1, 1973, under the Richard Nixon administration. Before serving as Secretary of Commerce, Peterson was chairman and CEO of Bell & Howell from 1963 to 1971. From 1973 to 1984 he was chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers. In 1985 he co-founded the private equity firm The Blackstone Group, and served as chairman. Peterson was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations until retiring in 2007, after being named chairman emeritus. In 2008, Peterson was ranked 149th on the "Forbes 400 Richest Americans" with a net worth of $2.8 billion. He was also known as founder and principal funder of The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting fiscal austerity.

Andy Janovich is an American football fullback for the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Nebraska, and was selected in the sixth round of the 2016 NFL Draft by the Denver Broncos.

Patricia Lynn "Patty" Wetterling is an American advocate of children's safety and chair of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Her advocacy particularly focuses on protecting children from abduction and abuse. In recent years Wetterling has become one of the most vocal critics of current sex offender registry laws pointing them as overly broad and unnecessarily causing tremendous harm to many. Her advocacy began after her son Jacob was abducted in 1989 and culminated in passage of federal Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act. She was a candidate for the Minnesota Sixth District seat in the United States House of Representatives as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate in 2004 and 2006, losing to Republicans Mark Kennedy and Michele Bachmann respectively. In September 2016, the remains of her son Jacob were discovered and positively identified.