"I've been addicted to the flight, the albatross reason and the eternal search for something I couldn't explain or give or create or destroy..."

• Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Triple threat,  Dennis Leroy Kangalee is a writer-director-actor & Artistic Director of the Kangalee Arts Ensemble. He is best known for his 1999 revival of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie at the National Black Theater and the related 2001 cult classic film, As an Act of Protest.  An outsider artist, he is an “actor’s actor” and even his approach to directing puts the performing artist above and beyond anything else.

He writes critical essays about radical art, Black cinema, and culture. He is the author of "Lying Meat" (poems), the 2011 solo play Gentrified Minds and several screenplays. A Juilliard alumnus, he is the creator of the "Visual Liberation" film pedagogy that relates certain political films to a tradition of American 'protest art'.  When not directing or developing new work, he performs monologues and continues his investigations into both the Theater of the Absurd and the Black Arts Movement. He recently completed a three year devotion to the study and performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

The 2024 play he wrote & staged - The Life & Death of Art - was the very first American drama to protest the genocide in Gaza and equate an alliance between Black Americans and Palestinians. 

Kangalee is the first North American artist ever to receive an authorized commission to write and perform an adaptation of Henry Miller’s mysterious short story, “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder” which premiered during the for the Henry Miller Symposium in October, 2025 in Big Sur, CA.

He is a proud 2024-2025 Artist-in-Action fellow at the Action Lab in NYC and the recent recipient of the Venturous Theater Fund’s Artist Initiative grant, provided by the Tides Foundation. This grant enabled the premiere of what quickly became regarded as his masterpiece, My Dying City Voll. II, which premiered in NYC January 2026. It exemplifies everything the Kangalee Arts Ensemble stands for, aesthetically and politically.

He is grateful for all the members, supporters, visionaries and glorious romantics who help to make The Kangalee Arts Ensemble a reality.

His writing workshops will take place for 8 weeks in NYC starting April 2nd, 2026!