Francesca Faridany

Francesca Faridany is a British-American actress born on July 15, 1969, in San Francisco, California. Though she was raised near the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex by her British parents, Faridany has maintained strong professional ties to the United States throughout her career. She trained at Drama Centre London, graduating in 1992.

Faridany began her acting career in 1999 with an appearance on the soap opera Guiding Light. Her television work has since spanned a wide range of productions, including ER, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Homeland, Bull, and FBI. She is perhaps most widely recognized for her recurring role as Fiona Clarke in the NBC drama series Manifest, which ran from 2018 to 2023. On film, she appeared in the 2018 Marvel Cinematic Universe feature Black Panther, in which she played a museum director.

On Broadway, Faridany was active between 2007 and 2014, accumulating credits across four productions. She appeared in Macbeth, Man and Boy, and The Homecoming, and starred in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Her stage work has also extended off-Broadway; in the fall of 2019, she appeared alongside Kate Mulgrew in The Half-Life of Marie Curie at the Minetta Lane Theatre.

In her personal life, Faridany married American writer and director Stephen Wadsworth in 2002, in a ceremony held in Garda, Italy.