Lupita Nyong’o Bio
Lupita Amondi Nyong’o (born 1 March 1983) is a Mexican-Kenyan-American actress who has earned an Academy Award, a Daytime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, along with nominations for two British Academy Film Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and a Tony Award. She first gained worldwide recognition for her film debut as Patsey in the historical drama 12 Years a Slave (2013), a performance that earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has since built a varied career across major Hollywood franchises, independent films, voice work, and Broadway theatre.
The daughter of Kenyan politician Anyang’ Nyong’o, she was born in Mexico City, where her father was teaching at the time, and was raised in Kenya from the age of three. Nyong’o holds citizenship in Mexico, Kenya, and the United States, and she identifies as Kenyan-Mexican. She is a graduate of Hampshire College and the Yale School of Drama, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in acting.
Early Life and Background
Lupita Amondi Nyong’o was born on 1 March 1983 in Mexico City to Kenyan parents, Dorothy Ogada Buyu and Anyang’ Nyong’o, a college professor. The family had left Kenya in 1980 because of political repression and unrest, and her father was a visiting lecturer in political science at El Colegio de México when she was born. The family returned to Kenya when she was under a year old, after her father was appointed as a professor at the University of Nairobi, and she grew up primarily in Nairobi in what she has described as a middle-class, suburban upbringing.
Nyong’o is of Luo descent on both sides of her family, and she is the second of six children. Following Luo naming traditions, her parents gave her a Spanish name, Lupita, which is a diminutive of Guadalupe, to reflect the events surrounding her birth in Mexico. She grew up in an artistic household where family get-togethers often included performances by the children and trips to see plays. She attended Rusinga International School in Kenya, where she acted in school plays and made her professional acting debut at the age of 14 as Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the Nairobi-based repertory company Phoenix Players.
She later attended St. Mary’s School in Nairobi, where she received an International Baccalaureate Diploma in 2001, and she went on to graduate from Hampshire College in Massachusetts with a degree in film and theatre studies. While at Hampshire, she credits the performances of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in The Color Purple with inspiring her to pursue a professional acting career.
Path to Celebrity
After graduating from college, Nyong’o began her career working as a production assistant on several films, including Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005), Mira Nair’s The Namesake (2006), and Salvatore Stabile’s Where God Left His Shoes (2007). She has cited British actor Ralph Fiennes, the star of The Constant Gardener, as another inspiration to pursue acting professionally. In 2008, she starred in the short film East River, directed by Marc Grey and shot in Brooklyn, and returned to Kenya that same year to appear in the MTV Base Africa and UNICEF television drama Shuga, which focused on HIV/AIDS prevention.
In 2009, she wrote, directed, and produced the documentary In My Genes, about the discriminatory treatment of Kenya’s albino population. The film won first prize at the 2008 Five College Film Festival and played at several other festivals. She also directed the music video for the song The Little Things You Do by Wahu, which was nominated for the Best Video Award at the MTV Africa Music Awards 2009.
Eager to sharpen her craft, Nyong’o enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program in acting at the Yale School of Drama. At Yale, she appeared in many stage productions, including Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights by Gertrude Stein, Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, and Shakespeare plays The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter’s Tale. She won the Herschel Williams Prize in the 2011 to 2012 academic year for acting students with outstanding ability.
Lupita Nyong’o Career
Early Career (2005 to 2012)
Nyong’o’s earliest professional work came behind the camera on international film productions between 2005 and 2007, where she built a working knowledge of the film industry. Her on-screen debut came in 2008 with the short film East River and the Kenyan television series Shuga, both of which helped her gain early visibility in Africa. Her self-directed documentary In My Genes and her music video work during this period marked her first steps as a filmmaker and creative leader.
Her decision to enroll at the Yale School of Drama signalled a turning point, as she committed to a formal course of study in acting. The theatre training she received at Yale, combined with her earlier production experience, prepared her for the breakthrough role that would arrive shortly after her graduation.
Breakthrough (2013 to 2019)
Immediately after graduating from Yale, Nyong’o was cast in Steve McQueen’s historical drama 12 Years a Slave (2013), based on the life of Solomon Northup, a free-born African-American man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. She portrayed Patsey, a slave who works alongside Northup at a Louisiana cotton plantation, and her performance earned widespread critical acclaim. She received nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and she won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She became the first Kenyan actress and the first Mexican to win an Academy Award, as well as the fifteenth actress to win an Oscar for a film debut performance.
Her first casting after winning the Oscar was for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) as the motion-capture character Maz Kanata, a role she reprised in subsequent Star Wars films. In 2015, she returned to the stage with a starring role in Eclipsed, a play by Danai Gurira set during the Second Liberian Civil War, which became the Public Theater’s fastest-selling new production in recent history and earned her an Obie Award for Outstanding Performance. The play transferred to Broadway in 2016 with an all-black and female creative cast and crew, and Nyong’o received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play.
She went on to voice the mother wolf Raksha in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book (2016) and to co-star in Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe (2016), a biopic about the Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. In 2018, she joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the spy Nakia in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, which grossed more than 1.34 billion dollars worldwide. She then starred as a kindergarten teacher in the comedy horror film Little Monsters (2019) and took on the dual lead role in Jordan Peele’s psychological horror film Us (2019), a performance that earned her a Screen Actors Guild nomination and an NAACP Image Award for Best Actress. Also in 2019, she narrated the Discovery Channel documentary series Serengeti and hosted the Channel 4 documentary Warrior Women with Lupita Nyong’o.
Notable Works and Milestones
Nyong’o is widely recognized for her role as Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, her motion-capture performance as Maz Kanata in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and her portrayal of Nakia in Black Panther and its sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). She has earned an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Daytime Emmy Award, a Tony Award nomination, and a Theatre World Award, and she was named the most beautiful woman by People in 2014. In 2019, she published the children’s book Sulwe, which became a number-one New York Times Best-Seller and won for Outstanding Literary Work for Children at the 2020 NAACP Image Awards.
Lupita Nyong’o Award Nominations
Lupita Nyong’o has received multiple award nominations across film, television, and theatre throughout her career. Her nominations include two British Academy Film Awards, a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for 12 Years a Slave, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Narrator for the documentary series Serengeti, a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Eclipsed, and a Saturn Award for Best Actress for Black Panther. She has also been nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama League Award for her Broadway work, an NAACP Image Award for Character Voice-Over Performance, and a Best Video Award at the MTV Africa Music Awards 2009 for her music video direction.
Lupita Nyong’o Awards Won
Nyong’o has won an Academy Award, a Daytime Emmy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Theatre World Award, among other honours. Her wins include the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for 12 Years a Slave, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role for the same film, the Outstanding Limited Performance in a Children’s Program category at the 48th Daytime Creative Arts Emmy Awards for Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices, the Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance for Eclipsed, and the Obie Award for Outstanding Performance for Eclipsed. She has also won an NAACP Image Award for Best Actress for Us and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Children for Sulwe.
Lupita Nyong’o Family
Lupita Nyong’o is the daughter of Kenyan politician Anyang’ Nyong’o, a former Member of the Kenyan Parliament and former Minister for Medical Services who serves as the Governor of Kisumu County, and Dorothy Ogada Buyu, the managing director of the Africa Cancer Foundation and her own communications company. She is the second of six children and is of Luo descent on both sides of her family.
Her extended family includes several prominent figures. Her cousin Tavia Nyong’o is a scholar and professor at Yale University, and her brother Omondi Nyong’o is a pediatric ophthalmologist based in Palo Alto, California. Her brother Kwame Nyong’o is one of Kenya’s leading animators and technology experts, and her cousin Isis Nyong’o is a media and technology leader who has been recognized by Forbes as one of Africa’s most powerful young women.
Personal Life
As of June 2024, Lupita Nyong’o lives in Los Angeles, California, having moved there from Brooklyn in June 2023 after the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a fluent speaker of English, Spanish, Luo, and Swahili. In October 2017, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal and the MeToo movement, she wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which she disclosed that Weinstein had sexually harassed her on two separate occasions in 2011, when she was a student at Yale. She turned down an offer to star in the Weinstein-distributed film Southpaw (2015) in response. Her op-ed was part of a collection of stories by The New York Times and The New Yorker that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Nyong’o had a lifelong fear of cats, but she underwent exposure therapy in order to work with her feline co-stars in the 2024 film A Quiet Place: Day One, and by the end of the film’s development she had adopted her own pet cat, named Yoyo. In 2025, she first spoke publicly about her experiences living with uterine fibroids, and in 2026 she shared details of her condition on social media on her 43rd birthday.
