Indiana Massara is the Australian actress and singer known for playing Rooney Forrester on the Brat teen series Chicken Girls, and for a string of pop singles that took her from Radio Disney airplay as a young teenager to a fresh solo music run in 2025 and 2026. She was born in a Perth suburb, moved to Los Angeles to chase acting and music, and has spent the last decade building a career that spans web series, film, podcasting, and streaming music, all while keeping most of her personal life out of the headlines.
Quick Facts About Indiana Massara
- Full name: Indiana Marie Ella Massara
- Born: August 23, 2002, in Coolbinia, Perth, Western Australia
- Occupation: Singer, actress, model, internet personality
- Years active: 2015 to present
- Known for: Chicken Girls, Chicken Girls: College Years, The Crusades, Broken Road
- Genre: Pop, synth-pop
Early Life and Family Roots
Massara grew up in Coolbinia, a quiet suburb of Perth, and comes from an Italian Australian background. By her own description, she was a tomboy as a kid, more interested in sports than in modeling shoots or acting classes.
Her path to Los Angeles started somewhat backward. Her parents and her older brother, Presley Massara, moved to the United States first so Presley could pursue acting, while Indiana stayed behind in Australia with her grandparents. She attended Mercedes College in Perth before deciding to join her family in Los Angeles, a move that reshaped the rest of her childhood.
Several fan and biography sites name her parents as Ian and Julie Massara, a detail repeated across multiple sources though not confirmed through an official statement from Massara herself. Presley, her older brother, also built an acting career of his own, and the two appeared together on the reality series Sh!t Happens between 2014 and 2016.
Her Italian roots and sporty upbringing are part of what she has pointed to in early interviews as shaping her work ethic once she moved into modeling and acting. Kiss FM later recognized her as one of its youngest New Next Up Artists, a nod to just how early her career began compared to most pop acts.
From Modeling Rejections to Chicken Girls Stardom
Massara’s entertainment career did not start where most people assume. According to her own account, she first tried out for acting roles and was turned down, in part because of her height, so she pivoted to modeling instead. That detour led to a runway spot at Los Angeles Fashion Week while she was still in her early teens, a booking she later called a dream come true in an old social media post.
The real turning point came in 2017, when Brat, the digital teen network, cast her as Rooney Forrester in Chicken Girls. The role became her signature part. She played Rooney as a main cast member through six seasons, stayed on in a recurring capacity for two more, and later reprised the character in the spin-off Chicken Girls: College Years in 2022 and 2023.
Brat also built other projects around her. She led the spin-off special Rooney’s Last Roll, appeared in Attaway Appeal, Holiday Spectacular, and Intern-in-Chief, crossed over into the companion series Total Eclipse and Stuck, and co-hosted the interview show Brat Chat alongside Darius Marcell. She even sang the theme song, “Run You Down,” for the network’s series Red Ruby.
Before any of that, Massara had already logged small parts in shorter web projects, including the 2015 comedy short Crafty and the series Connect and Saturated, credits that read now as early practice runs for the bigger role Chicken Girls would hand her two years later.
Music Career: A Decade of Pop Singles and a 2025 Reinvention
Long before streaming numbers became the industry’s main scoreboard, Massara was already charting on traditional youth radio. Her debut single, “Drama,” featuring Stoppa, landed in the top ten on Radio Disney in 2017, and she went on to reach the top three on that same countdown more than once, with airplay stretching across the United States, Australia, and Canada.
The singles kept coming through her teenage years: “Smoke in My Eyes,” “In Your Dreams,” “Do Yourself a Favour,” and “Apology” with rapper 24hrs in 2018, followed by “That Day,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” and a collaboration with Jules LeBlanc and Aliyah Moulden called “Over It” in 2019. “Squeeze” arrived in 2020, and “Brainstorm” appeared on the soundtrack to her 2021 film Hero Mode.
She toured behind the music too, joining Tayler Holder, Zach Clayton, and Joey Birlem on the Swipe Up Live run through Australia in 2018, then opening for Why Don’t We, Bryce Vine, and Ava Max at a Kiss FM summer show in 2019. A later feature, “Hopeless,” paired her with Australian rapper Illy.
After a quieter stretch, Massara signed with Chugg Music, and the label describes 2025 as the start of a relaunched solo project. New singles including “Cold” with Alex Sampson, “Healing Wounds,” “Fallen Trust,” and, into 2026, “Hot Grease Feet” with Danika Diamond, mark a more grown-up sound than her Radio Disney era. She has cited SZA, Khalid, Jack & Jack, and Beyonce as current influences, alongside an early love for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.
Her early music videos, including “Smoke in My Eyes,” “Do Yourself a Favor,” and “In Your Dreams,” were all directed by James Toth, giving her first singles a consistent visual identity before different directors took over for later releases like “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Squeeze.” Her YouTube channel, built largely around these videos and behind-the-scenes content, has grown to roughly 414 thousand subscribers and more than 27 million total views.
Acting Beyond Rooney Forrester
Chicken Girls made her a familiar face, but Massara has kept building an acting resume around it. She played Paige in the 2021 feature Hero Mode and took the role of Jess in the 2023 film The Crusades. Her podcast work also crossed into scripted territory through Broken Road, where she voiced the character Carly Clark across eight episodes in 2022.
She has also stepped outside the Brat ecosystem entirely at times, guest starring as Britney on an episode of the ABC sitcom Single Parents in 2019, a credit that showed she could hold her own on a mainstream network show rather than only teen streaming platforms.
Industry listings point to more acting ahead, including a short film called Exit Strategy, in which she plays a character named Dillon, and a completed short titled Summer of ’76, where she plays a character called Harper. A separate 2025 short, Three’s A Party, cast her as a character named Devil, and a project referred to as Dating Show is also listed among her upcoming credits. None of these have been widely reported on beyond casting and credit listings, so release dates and further details remain to be confirmed.
Podcasting and Life Off Camera
In June 2020, Massara launched Dropouts, a podcast she co-hosted with friends Zach Justice and Jared “JareBear” Bailey. The show built a following by bringing on guests from the wider teen entertainment world, including Josh Peck, Brighton Sharbino, Paris Berelc, Nick Turturro, and Mike E. Winfield.
She later moved on from that project and joined the cast of Broken Road in 2022, a scripted audio series rather than an interview format. Between the podcast years, the acting credits, and the music releases, Massara has effectively worked three overlapping careers since her mid-teens, something that sets her apart from peers who tend to specialize in just one lane.
Social Media Reach and Digital Influence
According to her management team at Chugg Music, Massara’s combined social channels reach more than nine million people, with her TikTok following alone sitting just under five million. That built-in audience has helped her music find listeners outside the traditional radio system her early singles relied on, and it gives her acting and podcast work a ready-made promotional channel.
Her online presence goes back to the earliest days of the Brat network’s rise, when short-form web series and Instagram were still the main discovery tools for teen audiences. She has stayed active across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube ever since, using each platform to support whichever project, music, acting, or podcasting, she has running at the time.
Net Worth: What the Estimates Actually Say
Massara has never confirmed a net worth figure herself, and no financial disclosure exists to verify one. Celebrity net worth sites have published wildly different numbers over the years, ranging from roughly $300,000 up to figures north of $5 million, depending on the site and the year it was published.
That spread says more about how these estimates are built than about Massara’s actual finances. Sites like Net Worth Spot calculate projections from public follower counts and estimated brand deal rates rather than any verified income statement, which is why the same public figure can show up with numbers that differ by a factor of ten depending on which site you check. Readers should treat any specific dollar figure attached to her name as an estimate, not a confirmed fact.
Personal Life
Massara has kept her relationships largely private. During her time on the Dropouts podcast, rumors circulated that she was dating co-host Zach Justice, which she addressed directly by describing the two as close friends rather than a couple. Beyond that clarification, she has not spoken publicly at length about her dating life, and no relationship status has been officially confirmed as current.
What Her Career Says About the Brat TV Generation
Massara belongs to a small group of performers who grew up inside Brat’s teen content machine and managed to build something more durable than a single hit show. Where many of her Chicken Girls co-stars leaned into one lane after the series wound down, she kept acting, kept releasing music, and kept a podcast running at the same time, treating each one as a separate skill to develop rather than a side hustle to abandon.
Her 2025 signing with Chugg Music and the run of new singles that followed suggest she is positioning herself as a pop artist first going forward, rather than an actress who also sings. Whether that reinvention lands with a wider audience than her Radio Disney years reached is still an open question, but it marks a clear, deliberate second act rather than a slow fade from a teen network that has since moved on to newer faces.
For a performer once turned down at acting auditions over her height, the range she has since covered, from chart-adjacent pop singles to network television and a fresh label deal, says more about persistence than any single hit show could.