Danai Gurira is an award-winning actress and playwright. She starred as General Okoye in Marvel’s 2018 Academy Award-winning blockbuster film Black Panther, for which she won a People’s Choice Award (Favorite Action Movie Star), an NAACP Image Award (Outstanding Supporting Actress/Motion Picture) and a shared SAG Award (Outstanding Performance by a Cast/Motion Picture). Later that year she reprised her role in Avengers: Infinity War and again in Avengers: Endgame, which went on to become the #1 top grossing film, in history at the time of its release. On television, she starred as the fiercely popular character Michonne on AMC’s landmark hit series The Walking Dead. Her other acting credits include the feature films All Eyez on Me, Mother of George, The Visitor, and Shakespeare in the Park’s stage production of Measure for Measure (Equity Callaway Award). Gurira also starred as the title character of Richard III for Shakespeare in the Park, which was directed by Robert O’Hara. She reprised her role of Okoye in the highly anticipated Black Panther sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which became one of the year's top grossing films. She can also be seen on The Ones Who Live for AMC in which she reprised her role of Michonne from The Walking Dead and reunites her with co-star Andrew Lincoln.

As a playwright, she is distinguished as the first African female writer to have a play on Broadway, and to bring the perspective of African women to mainstream theater. Her plays include In the Continuum (OBIE Award, Outer Critics Award, Helen Hayes Award), Eclipsed (Tony 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, L.A. Outer Critics Award). Her play, Familiar, received its world premiere at Yale Rep and premiered in New York at Playwrights Horizons in February of 2016. Commissioned by Yale Rep, Center Theatre Group, Playwrights Horizons, and the Royal Court, she is a recipient of the Sam Norkin Award (2016 Drama Desk Awards), a Whiting Award as well as a Hodder Fellowship.

Born in Iowa to Zimbabwean parents and raised in Zimbabwe, Gurira holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. An ambassador for Bono’s ONE campaign, she is co-founder of Almasi Arts Alliance [almasiarts.org], which works to give access and opportunity to African dramatic artists. With a personal dedication to effect tangible change in gender equality and push global leaders toward real policy transformation, she is founder of Love Our Girls, which spotlights the specific challenges faced by women and girls while celebrating the courageous work by organizations seeking to make a difference. In December 2018 she was also named a Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women, supporting its mandate of gender equality and women’s rights and leveraging her celebrity as an amplifier of other women’s voices.