Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lupita Nyong'o won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Patsey in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013). She became the sixth black actress, the first Kenyan, and the first Mexican to win the award, and was the fifteenth actress ever to receive an Oscar for a debut film performance.
Lupita Nyong'o was born on the 1st of March 1983 in Mexico City to Kenyan parents. She is of Luo descent on both sides of her family and holds Kenyan, Mexican, and United States citizenship. She identifies as Kenyan-Mexican and speaks English, Spanish, Luo, and Swahili.
Lupita Nyong'o played Nakia, a spy and former member of Dora Milaje, in Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018). To prepare, she learned to speak Xhosa and trained in judo, jujitsu, silat, and Filipino martial arts. Black Panther grossed over $1.34 billion worldwide.
Lupita Nyong'o wrote Sulwe, published in 2019 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Sulwe is the Luo word for "star," and the book follows a five-year-old Kenyan girl with the darkest complexion in her family, drawing on Nyong'o's own childhood experiences. It reached number one on the New York Times Best-Seller list.
In 2025, Nyong'o said that after winning the Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave, the roles she was offered were largely other enslaved characters. She described herself as "a joyful warrior for changing the paradigms of what it means to be African" and said she would work fewer jobs rather than perpetuate stereotypes associated with people from her continent.
In October 2017, Nyong'o published an op-ed in The New York Times describing two incidents of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein in 2011, while she was a Yale student. Her piece was part of a body of New York Times and New Yorker reporting that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.