Nicole Ari Parker

Nicole Ari Parker has been featured in Touchstone Picture's Remember the Titans, Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins with Martin Lawrence, Boogie Nights with Mark Wahlberg, the HBO original film Dancing in September and opposite Taye Diggs in Fox Searchlight's Brown Sugar. She is best known for her outstanding performance as Teri Joseph of Showtime's award-winning Soul Food and has displayed her acting range in several blockbuster and independent films. Parker starred opposite Eddie Murphy in Paramount Pictures' Imagine That, and recently appeared with Rockmond Dunbar in Pastor Brown. She has also been featured in such independent films as 200 Cigarettes, Shooting Gallery's Loving Jezebel, Subway Stories and Sebastian Cole, a winner at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Her extensive background in theatre includes Off-Broadway productions Chicago, House of Lear and Romeo and Juliet. She also appeared in the television movies "The Loretta Claiborne Story," "Exiled" and "Mind Prey".

Parker began pursuing her dream at the Baltimore Actors Theatre and then it was on to Washington Ballet Company, before moving to New York to study further at New York University. She is a graduate of NYU's famed Tisch School of the Arts. She has been nominated for seven NAACP Image Awards and had the pleasure of presenting President Bill Clinton with a Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award at a ceremony hosted by the NAACP. She also received a special award at the Urban World Film Festival, for Outstanding Body of Work as an Actress. Parker starred alongside former Soul Food co-star and real life spouse Boris Kodjoe in the Paramount/UPN sit-com, "Second Time Around." Some of Parker's upcoming projects include 35 and Ticking; TV movie, "Big Mike;" and she will be appearing in an episode of the new television series, "Let's Stay Together." In January 2009, Parker was featured in "People Magazine" to introduce Sophie's Voice Foundation (www.sophiesvoicefoundation.org), the charitable organization she started with husband Boris to raise awareness about children and adults living with spina bifida.