Lupita Nyong'o

Lupita Nyong’o is a Kenyan-Mexican actor, director, and author whose breakthrough film role, Patsey in Steve McQueen’s 2013 historical drama 12 Years a Slave, brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Born in Mexico City on March 1, 1983, she is the daughter of Kenyan politician Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o and Dorothy Nyong’o. Her family returned to Kenya when she was less than a year old, and she was raised largely in Nairobi. At 16, she went back to Mexico for seven months to learn Spanish. She later studied film and theatre at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, graduating in 2007. Before acting prominently on screen, Nyong’o worked in production and made the 2009 documentary In My Genes, about several Kenyans living with albinism. She then earned a master’s degree in acting from the Yale School of Drama in 2012. Her performance as Patsey, an enslaved young woman subjected to brutal abuse on an antebellum Louisiana plantation, was her first feature-film part. The role won her an Oscar, making her the first Kenyan and first Mexican actress to receive an Academy Award. She also received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a supporting role and the Critics’ Choice Movie Award. Nyong’o joined major franchise films as Maz Kanata, the pirate and former smuggler introduced in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and returned in The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019). In Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), she played Nakia, a Wakandan spy and T’Challa’s former lover; she reprised the character in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). She voiced Raksha, Mowgli’s wolf mother, in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book (2016), and appeared as Adelaide Wilson and her doppelgänger, Red, in Jordan Peele’s horror film Us (2019). In 2024, she starred in the prequel A Quiet Place: Day One. On stage, Nyong’o played the adolescent orphan Ayah in the 2015 Broadway production of Eclipsed, Danai Gurira’s play about Liberian women during the Second Liberian Civil War. Her work earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play. In 2019, she published Sulwe, a children’s picture book illustrated by Vashti Harrison. Its central character, a Kenyan girl with very dark skin, struggles with colorism before learning to value her complexion. Nyong’o is also a producer and has advocated for women’s rights and the representation of African stories and darker-skinned women in film.