Lupita Nyong'o

Lupita Amondi Nyong'o, born on March 1, 1983, in Mexico City, is a Kenyan-Mexican actress whose accolades include an Academy Award, an Actor Award, and a Daytime Emmy Award, along with nominations for a Tony Award, two British Academy Film Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. Her father, Anyang' Nyong'o, was serving as a visiting lecturer in political science at El Colegio de México at the time of her birth; the family had left Kenya in 1980 due to political repression and unrest. Nyong'o holds Kenyan, Mexican, and United States citizenship and identifies as Kenyan-Mexican. She is of Luo descent on both sides of her family and is the second of six children. Her given name, Lupita, a diminutive of Guadalupe, reflects the Luo tradition of naming children after the circumstances of their birth.

The family returned to Kenya before Nyong'o was a year old, after her father was appointed a professor at the University of Nairobi. She grew up in Nairobi, attending Rusinga International School and later St. Mary's School, where she earned an IB Diploma in 2001, finishing second in her class. At fourteen, she made her professional acting debut playing Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet staged by the Nairobi-based Phoenix Players, with whom she also performed in On the Razzle and There Goes the Bride. At sixteen, she spent seven months in Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico, studying Spanish through the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México's Learning Centre for Foreigners. She subsequently traveled to the United States for higher education, earning a bachelor's degree in film and theatre studies from Hampshire College. She later completed a master's degree in acting at the Yale School of Drama, where she appeared in productions including Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter's Tale, and received the Herschel Williams Prize in the 2011–12 academic year for outstanding acting ability.

Nyong'o began her professional screen career working as a production assistant on several films, including Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener (2005), Mira Nair's The Namesake (2006), and Salvatore Stabile's Where God Left His Shoes (2007). In 2008, she starred in the short film East River, directed by Marc Grey and shot in Brooklyn, and subsequently returned to Kenya to appear in Shuga, an MTV Base Africa and UNICEF television drama focused on HIV/AIDS prevention that ran from 2009 to 2012. That same year, she wrote, directed, and produced the documentary In My Genes, examining the discriminatory treatment of Kenya's albino population; the film won first prize at the 2008 Five College Film Festival. She also directed the music video for Wahu's "The Little Things You Do," featuring Bobi Wine, which received a nomination for Best Video at the MTV Africa Music Awards 2009.

Immediately following her graduation from Yale, Nyong'o was cast as Patsey in Steve McQueen's historical drama 12 Years a Slave (2013), a film based on the life of Solomon Northup, a free-born African-American man kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. Her performance earned widespread critical acclaim and brought her nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress, which she won. She also received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the sixth Black actress to win that honor.

Nyong'o made her Broadway debut in Eclipsed, playing a teenage orphan in the play, which appeared on Broadway in 2016. Her performance earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play and a Theatre World Award in 2016. Her stage work at that time represented a significant complement to her growing film career, which included a motion capture role as Maz Kanata in the Star Wars sequel trilogy (2015–2019) and a voice role as Raksha in The Jungle Book (2016). She went on to portray Nakia in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Black Panther (2018) and its 2022 sequel, and took on starring roles in the horror films Us (2019) and A Quiet Place: Day One (2024). She also provided the lead voice in the animated film The Wild Robot (2024).

Beyond her acting work, Nyong'o authored the children's book Sulwe in 2019, which reached the number-one position on the New York Times Best Sellers list. She received nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator for her work on two episodes of the docu-series Serengeti. In 2020, Forbes named her one of Africa's 50 Most Powerful Women. She is an advocate for historic preservation, the prevention of sexual harassment, and women's and animal rights. Her father, Anyang' Nyong'o, has served as Governor of Kisumu County, Kenya, and previously as a Member of the Kenyan Parliament and Minister for Medical Services. Her mother serves as managing director of the Africa Cancer Foundation and her own communications company.