My Journey
Nicole Ari Parker is as adept at portraying strong sexy women as she is at playing vulnerable and complicated characters. She is best known for her outstanding performance as Teri Joseph on the award-winning Soul Food and has displayed her acting range in several blockbuster and independent films. She has been featured in Remember the Titans, Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins with Martin Lawrence, Boogie Nights with Mark Wahlberg, the original film Dancing in September and opposite Taye Diggs in Brown Sugar.
Parker starred opposite Eddie Murphy in Imagine That, and has been featured in such independent films as 200 Cigarettes, Loving Jezebel, Subway Stories and Sebastian Cole, a winner at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.
Her extensive background in theatre includes Off-Broadway productions like Chicago, House of Lear and Romeo and Juliet. She also appeared in the television movies The Loretta Claiborne Story, Exiled and Mind Prey.
Parker always knew she wanted to be an actress. She began pursuing her dream at the Baltimore Actors Theatre and thenWashington 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 sitcom, Second Time Around, effectively raising the bar for Hollywood power couples.
In January 2009, Parker was featured in People Magazine to introduce Sophie’s Voice Foundation, the charitable organization she started with husband Boris to raise awareness about children and adults living with spina bifida.
Filmography
Latest News
Broadway revival to open April 22
The Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" has firmed up its dates, skedding an opening in April at the Broadhurst left available by the abrupt nix of tuner "Rebecca."
Starring Blair Underwood, Nicole Ari Parker, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Wood Harris, the multiracial staging had been circling the Rialto for several months, but no real estate opened up until the underfunded "Rebecca" shut down two weeks before the start of rehearsals.
Emily Mann helms the revival, which has original music by jazz musician and film composer Terence Blanchard. Producer Stephen Byrd brought an all-black production of Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" to the Rialto that turned a profit and went on to a West End run. He produces "Streetcar" with Alia Jones and Anthony Lacavera.
"Streetcar" begins previews April 3 and opens
April 22.
Nicole Ari Parker has been tapped to play Blanche DuBois opposite previously announced star Blair Underwood as Stanley Kowalski in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar
Named Desire.