Taraji P. Henson

Few performers have shaped modern screen culture the way Taraji P. Henson has. Born September 11, 1970, in Southeast Washington, D.C., and raised on the values of hope and love — the Swahili meanings of her names — she worked mornings as a Pentagon secretary and evenings as a singing-dancing waitress to fund her drama studies at Howard University. Her film debut came with Streetwise in 1998, and a SAG card earned through background work in the early 1990s marked the first step of a remarkable climb.

The 2001 comedy-drama Baby Boy put her on the map, but it was her singing debut as Shug in Hustle & Flow (2005) and her portrayal of Queenie in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) that announced her range — the latter earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Television made her a household name: as Joss Carter on CBS’s Person of Interest (2011–2013), then as Cookie Lyon on Fox’s Empire (2015–2020), a role that won her a Golden Globe and made her the first Black actress to take the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series.

Her film résumé spans Hidden Figures (2016), in which she played NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, Acrimony, What Men Want, and The Color Purple (2023), alongside six Emmy nominations and a 2024 Tony Award nomination as a producer of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. She holds a record six BET Awards for Best Actress, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019, and was named among Time’s 100 most influential people in both 2016 and 2024.

Beyond the screen, Henson penned the New York Times bestseller Around the Way Girl (2016), founded the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation to address mental health in the Black community, and was appointed by President Biden in 2022 to the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.