Shahadi Wright Joseph

Shahadi Wright Joseph is an American actress, singer, and dancer born on April 29, 2005, in Brooklyn, New York. She began dancing at the age of two and demonstrated an early interest in performance, notably using Lupita Nyong'o's Academy Award acceptance speech during a third-grade school play audition.

Joseph's first major acting role came at age nine, when she was cast as Young Nala in the Broadway production of The Lion King. She subsequently appeared on Broadway as Madison, an original cast member in Andrew Lloyd Webber's School of Rock – The Musical. Her Broadway career spans credits from 1997 to 2015.

Beyond the stage, Joseph expanded into television with a role as Little Inez Stubbs in the NBC musical special Hairspray Live! in 2016, which received positive reviews. In 2018, she took on the lead role of Holiday Anders in the podcast Six Minutes, a position she continued to hold.

In 2019, Joseph voiced Young Nala in Jon Favreau's musical film The Lion King, reprising the character she had originated on Broadway. The casting was announced in November 2017, and Joseph has cited the character as a role model for young girls. Upon learning that Beyoncé would voice the adult version of Nala, Joseph stated the news motivated her to work harder and consider how Beyoncé would approach the role.

Also in 2019, Joseph starred in Jordan Peele's supernatural horror film Us, playing the dual role of Zora and Umbrae. She auditioned for the part three times before being cast. The film was both a critical and commercial success, and her performance earned nominations including a Saturn Award and a Critics' Choice Movie Award.

Joseph later took on the starring role of Ruby Lee Emory in the Amazon Prime Video horror drama series Them, which premiered in April 2021 to generally positive reviews.