The Walking Dead

Danai Gurira

Danai Gurira is an award-winning playwright and actress. As a playwright, her works include In the Continuum (OBIE Award, Outer Critics Award, Helen Hayes Award), Eclipsed (Tony Award Nomination: Best Play; NAACP Award; Helen Hayes Award: Best New Play; Connecticut Critics Circle Award: Outstanding Production of a Play), and The Convert (six Ovation Awards, Los Angeles Outer Critics Award). Her newest play, Familiar, received its world premiere at Yale Rep in 2015, and premiered in New York at Playwrights Horizons in February of 2016. She is a recipient of the Sam Norkin Award at the 2016 Drama Desk Awards, a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellow, and has been commissioned by Yale Rep, Center Theatre Group, Playwrights Horizons, and the Royal Court. As an actor, Gurira starred in Marvel’s 2018 blockbuster phenomenon and Academy Award winning film Black Panther as General Okoye. Later that year she reprised her role in Avengers: Infinity War and this past spring in Avengers: Endgame, which is poised to break box office records. She currently stars as Michonne on AMC’s The Walking Dead (NAACP Image Award nomination), which is going into its tenth season and continues to be the top-rated show on cable. Her other select acting credits include the films All Eyez on Me (NAACP Image Award nomination), The Visitor, Mother of George and the NYS&F’s Measure for Measure (Equity Callaway Award). Gurira is currently adapting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book Americanah into a miniseries. Born in the US to Zimbabwean parents and raised in Zimbabwe, she holds an M.F.A. from Tisch, NYU and serves as an ambassador for Bono’s ONE campaign. She is also the founder of LOGpledge.org, an awareness-building campaign focused on the plights of women and girls around the globe; and the co-founder of Almasi Arts, which works to give access and opportunity to the African Dramatic Artist. almasiartsalliance.org. In December of 2018 she was named a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. She will lend her name and dedicate her support to spotlight gender equality and women’s rights, bringing unheard women’s voices front and center.