Will Smith

Will Smith served as a producer on FELA! both Off-Broadway and on Broadway.

Smith first gained recognition as part of a hip hop duo with DJ Jazzy Jeff, with whom he released five studio albums which contained five Billboard Hot 100-top 20 singles—"Parents Just Don't Understand", "A Nightmare on My Street", "Summertime", "Ring My Bell", and "Boom! Shake the Room"—from 1985 to 1994. He released the solo albums Big Willie Style (1997), Willennium (1999), Born to Reign (2002), and Lost and Found (2005), which spawned the U.S. number-one singles "Gettin' Jiggy wit It" and "Wild Wild West". He has won four Grammy Awards for his recording career.

Smith began his acting career starring as a fictionalized version of himself on the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–1996), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1993 and 1994. He achieved wider fame as a leading man with the film franchises Bad Boys (1995–2024) and Men in Black (1997–2012), where he respectively portrayed Mike Lowrey and Agent J. After starring in the thrillers Independence Day (1996) and Enemy of the State (1998), he received Academy Award for Best Actor nominations for his portrayals of Muhammad Ali in Ali (2001) and Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). He also starred in commercially successful films such as I, Robot (2004), Shark Tale (2004), Hitch (2005), I Am Legend (2007), Hancock (2008), Seven Pounds (2008), Suicide Squad (2016), and Aladdin (2019).

For his portrayal of Richard Williams in the biographical sports drama King Richard (2021), Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actor.