Roger Guenveur Smith is a renowned actor, writer, and director, celebrated globally for his remarkable body of work in both stage and screen productions.
Notably, he adapted his Obie Award-winning solo performance of A Huey P. Newton Story into a Peabody Award-winning television film, directed by his long-time collaborator Spike Lee, with whom he has continued to work together in an unparalleled partnership in American cinema.
Smith's impressive acting career spans a wide range of characters, including Smiley in Lee's Oscar-nominated film Do The Right Thing, Yoda in Lee's school daze, a Russian roulette-playing gangster in Malcolm X, a guitar-playing cop in Get On The Bus, the street philosopher Big Time Willie in He Got Game, a hardnose detective in Summer Of Sam, and an opportunistic insurance salesman in Chi-Raq.
Recent credits include The Birth Of A Nation, Bitch, which have achieved distinction in three consecutive Sundance Festivals, and the acclaimed independent films Mooz-Lum and Better Mus' Come, in which he plays the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
Smith's astonishing range is further demonstrated in cult classics such as Deep Cover and King Of New York, Eve's Bayou, Hamlet, All About The Benjamins, and American Gangster, for which he was nominated for the Screen Actors' Guild Award. On HBO, he has starred in Steven Soderbergh's K Street, Oz, and Unchained Memories: Readings From The Slave Narrative.
Before entering the Yale School of Drama, Smith studied history, earning an undergraduate degree in American Studies at Occidental College, where he was part of a class that included Angela Bassett, Charles S. Dutton, and John Turturro.
He has continued to combine his interests through an ever-evolving stage repertoire, which includes Frederick Douglass Now, Christopher Columbus 1992, The Watts Towers Project, In Honor Of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Two Fires, Patriot Act, Juan and John, The End Of Black History Month, Who Killed Bob Marley?, Iceland, and, with Mark Broyard, Inside The Creole Mafia, a "not too dark comedy."
Smith's work is frequently developed through intense archival immersion and improvisation, a process that informs his performing history workshop, which he currently directs at Cal Arts.
Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, Steven Berkoff's Agamemnon, and the Bessie and Ovation Award-winning Radio Mambo are also among his directorial credits.
Smith frequently collaborates with composer/videographer Marc Anthony Thompson (Chocolate Genius Inc.) and presents his work at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles.
Born in Berkeley, California, and raised in Los Angeles, Smith currently resides with his wife, writer LeTania Kirkland, and their three children, as well as his adult daughter from a former marriage.
