Nana Mensah

Nana Afiah Mensah is a Ghanaian American actress, writer, and director. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut and raised in the Farmington Valley region. Her parents emigrated from Ghana in the 1970s, and her father works as a chemical engineer. She has one brother. Mensah attended the Loomis Chaffee School, a private boarding school, where drama teacher Brian Kosanovich encouraged her to pursue acting professionally.

Mensah earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Following graduation, her parents encouraged her to attend law school, and she spent time working in the legal field before relocating to New York City in 2009 to pursue acting. To support herself during that period, she worked in restaurants, retail, administration, and childcare. Her training included programs at the now-defunct Actors Center, the Shakespeare Lab at the Public Theater, and the LAByrinth Theater Company Master Class.

Her early screen work included the 2009 film The Film You Did Not See, in which she played Leslie, followed by roles in short films including the 2010 comedy Behold the Swelling Scene, the 2012 comedy Alternate Sides, and the 2013 biographical drama Daadi. In 2014, she joined the web series An African City, playing Sade, a Nigerian-Ghanaian expat. Created by Nicole Amarteifio, the series was described as Africa's answer to Sex and the City. Mensah reprised the role for the second season.

Her stage work spans multiple off-Broadway productions, including The Bacchae, Mother Courage and Her Children, Inked Baby, A Question of Impeachment, and Nollywood Dreams, in which she played Dede. The production of Nollywood Dreams was interrupted by COVID-19, after which she reprised the role. In 2016, she starred as Clare in the Obie Award-winning play I'll Never Love Again. The following year, she played Tamyra in Man from Nebraska, earning an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress. In 2023, Mensah made her Broadway debut in Jaja's African Hair Braiding.

On screen, Mensah appeared in the 2020 film Farewell Amor as Linda, a film that had its premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival's U.S. Dramatic Competition. In 2021, she portrayed Yasmin "Yaz" McKay, a popular English professor, in the Netflix series The Chair. Her other television credits include 13 Reasons Why, New Amsterdam, Bonding, and a recurring role on The Diplomat, which premiered on Netflix in 2023, where she plays Billie Appiah, the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. She has also worked as a staff writer on Random Acts of Flyness, Amazon's The Power, and the second season of the Netflix series Bonding, and sold an hour-long drama pilot called Imperium to AMC.

Mensah wrote, directed, and starred in the feature film Queen of Glory, which centers on a Ghanaian American academic who inherits a Christian bookstore following her mother's death. The film took over seven years to complete in total, though principal photography was finished in 30 days. Funding came from investors, Kickstarter campaigns, and Mensah's own savings. She cited Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, films by the Duplass Brothers, Kevin Smith's Clerks, and Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture as influences. Mensah has stated that frustration with limited and stereotypical roles motivated her to create the film. Queen of Glory premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival U.S. Narrative Competition, where Mensah won Best New Narrative Director and the Special Jury Prize for Artistic Expression. The film was also nominated for Best First Feature at the 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards and received prizes from the Champs-Élysées Film Festival and the inaugural California Film Institute's Mind the Gap Creation Prize. In February 2022, Film Movement acquired the film for theatrical and video-on-demand release.