Ryan Jamaal Swain

Ryan Jamaal Swain is an American actor and dancer born on March 13, 1994, in Orlando, Florida. He is the eldest of four children and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Swain began tap dancing at age four and went on to train in ballet, jazz, modern, and hip-hop dance. During his childhood and adolescence, he worked with organizations including the Alabama Dance Academy, Alabama Ballet, Red Mountain Theatre Company, Birmingham Children's Theatre, and Virginia Samford Theatre. He began catalog modeling at eight years old and initially pursued professional tennis before turning to acting during his freshman year at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Swain earned a B.F.A. from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and also studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, U.K., before relocating to New York City.

While at Howard University, Swain appeared in productions including Anything Goes, and he later performed in plays such as Six Degrees of Separation and Thoughts of a Colored Man. His Off-Broadway work includes Kill Move Paradise at the National Black Theatre in New York. In 2019, Swain made his Broadway debut in Choir Boy. He has also given back to the theater community, hosting an acting workshop at the Forma Arts + Wellness studio in Birmingham in 2018.

Swain is widely recognized for his role as Damon Richards-Evangelista in the FX series Pose, created by Ryan Murphy, for which he was cast in 2017. The show premiered on June 3, 2018, and its first season featured the largest cast of transgender actors ever assembled for a scripted network series, with over 50 transgender characters. The series was renewed for a second season on July 12, 2018. Having grown up in the South, Swain had no prior exposure to ball culture and drew on the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which he had watched during college, to inform his performance. He also drew on his personal experience of arriving in New York City with very little money to pursue his career. Swain's character appeared in the first episode of the third and final season of Pose before being written out of the series, a departure connected to the death of his sister, Raven Lynette Swain, who was shot and killed in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 28, 2020.

Swain's writing work includes A Negro Writer, a one-man show he wrote and performed in 2014 about the life of Langston Hughes. He has also announced plans to write a teen fiction book centered on a Southern teenager. Swain identifies as queer and has spoken about experiencing physical and emotional abuse from his stepfather during childhood due to his sexuality.