Ntare Mwine

Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine is an American actor, playwright, photographer, and documentarian born in 1967 in Hanover, New Hampshire to Ugandan parents. His father, trained as an attorney at Harvard Law School, later worked in finance in the United States, including a period at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. His mother relocated to Kenya following his parents' separation when Mwine was seven, where she taught psychology at the University of Nairobi. Mwine pursued formal training at the University of Virginia, the Moscow Arts Theatre, and the Royal National Theatre in London before earning a Master of Fine Arts from New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts in 1992. He was credited professionally as Ntare Mwine until 2008, after which he used his full name.

Mwine's first professional engagement came immediately upon completing his graduate studies, when he was cast as Paul in the 1992 U.S. National Tour of Six Degrees of Separation, playing a con man who poses as Sidney Poitier's son. That performance earned him an NAACP Image Award nomination for Best Actor. His Broadway appearance in Six Degrees of Separation also dates to 1992. In 1997, he appeared in Nomathemba at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Non-Resident Production for that role, having received a prior nomination in the same category in 1992 for Six Degrees of Separation at the National Theatre. In 1994 he appeared in The Riddles of Race, Circa '68, and in 1998 he played Julius Van George in Scent of the Roses at the Seattle Contemporary Theatre.

As a playwright, Mwine wrote and performed Biro, a solo stage work depicting a Ugandan former rebel soldier who has entered the United States illegally to seek medical treatment and spends ninety minutes explaining his circumstances to his lawyer while held in a Texas jail. The play premiered at Uganda's National Theatre in early 2003 and subsequently ran at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York, as well as in Los Angeles, Seattle, London, and across Africa. In 2004, Mwine performed the work for multiple African heads of state and then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Mwine's screen career spans both film and television across several decades. He made his film debut in Blood Diamond and his first television appearance in New York Undercover in 1995. His television credits include a recurring role as Usutu in Heroes, having originally been cast as a different character named Joseph in the unaired pilot before that role was removed when NBC ordered the full series. He appeared as Tom Adler in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and as Maurice Devereaux in The Riches. He also held a recurring role in the HBO series Treme, set in New Orleans's Tremé district in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and in 2018 joined the Showtime series The Chi as Ronnie, a character living on Chicago's South Side. On April 5, 2021, he joined the Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer, starring alongside Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, as Detective Raymond Griggs, a character created specifically for the television adaptation of the novel The Brass Verdict.

Mwine's photographic work has been exhibited at the United Nations, the Latino Art Museum in Pomona, California, UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History, and museums internationally. His photography appeared in Vanity Fair and was featured prominently in the television series Six Feet Under, as well as serving as a central element of Biro. His documentary work includes Beware of Time, which screened at the 2004 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Black International Cinema in Berlin, where it was named Best Film on Matters Relating to Marginalized People. The film documents the lives of Ugandans and includes a rare interview with Amule Amin, brother of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. His second documentary, Memories of Love Returned, chronicles the life and archive of Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo, a rural Ugandan photographer who documented the town of Mbirizi over more than five decades. In 2019, Mwine delivered the keynote address at the Ugandan North American Association convention in Chicago, Illinois.