Sahr Ngaujah

Michael Sahr Ngaujah was born on September 7, 1976, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to an African-American mother and a Sierra Leonean Kono father, who had arrived in the United States by way of the United Kingdom. Within five years of his birth, the family settled in Atlanta, Georgia, where Ngaujah would spend his formative years. He is an American theater actor and director whose Broadway career spans 2009 to 2019.

Ngaujah's introduction to theater came through the Youth Ensemble of Atlanta, a program connected to 7Stages Theatre in the Little 5 Points neighborhood. He began acting professionally at age 15, and his early directorial work developed under the mentorship of Freddie Hendricks, with whom he served as an assistant director on productions that reached audiences at events including the Atlanta Black Arts Festival and the Tweetakt Festival 2000 in Antwerp. His early collaborators included Del Hamilton at 7 Stages in Atlanta and Tim Habeger at PushPush Theater and Film, also in Atlanta.

In 2001, Ngaujah relocated to Amsterdam, where he pursued work as both a theater director and developer. He collaborated with Rotterdam's Lef and ACT Festival and worked alongside the company Made n da Shade. He completed his studies at Dasarts in Amsterdam in 2006 under the direction of Alida Neslo and Monique Toebosch, and his time there included close work with artists Shu Lea Chang and Germaine Acogny. During this period he also collaborated with directors Gerrit Timmers at Onafhankelijk Toneel in Rotterdam and Falk Richter at the Berlin Schaubühne, as well as Walter Chakela at Windybrow in Johannesburg. In late 1999, Ngaujah had begun writing what became the short story collection Refracting, published by Dasarts in 2004, which in turn inspired the theatrical piece Conversations with Ice, presented at Amsterdam's BitterZoet in 2006 and at the Over Het Ij Festival in Amsterdam in 2007. That work examines questions of value and commerce within the context of the global diamond trade, Sierra Leone's child soldiers, and connections to hip-hop's bling subculture. Ngaujah presented the development of Conversations with Ice at art conferences across Northern Europe in 2007 and 2008.

His screen work began in the late 1990s with television appearances in Passing Glory for TNT and A Lesson Before Dying for HBO, followed by film roles including How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Stomp the Yard for Sony in 2007, The Signal in 2008, and Blood Done Sign My Name in 2009. He later appeared in ABC's Last Resort in 2012 and Netflix's Luke Cage in 2018. In July 2017, he provided the voice for the hero Doomfist in the video game Overwatch.

Ngaujah received the Audelco Award in November 2008 for his performance in the Off-Broadway production of Fela!, directed by Bill T. Jones, a musical exploring the life of Nigerian composer Fela Anikulapo Kuti. New York magazine named Fela! the number one theater show of 2008. The production transferred to Broadway in 2009, where Ngaujah starred in the title role and earned both a Tony Award nomination and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for his performance. He also received the Theatre World Award in 2010 in recognition of his Broadway work in the production.

Ngaujah returned to Broadway in 2019 with Moulin Rouge! The Musical, in which he played Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The production had begun preview performances at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston in the summer of 2018 before moving to Broadway, and his performance earned him a second Tony Award nomination.