"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

A maverick triple threat (actor, writer, director) Dennis Leroy Kangalee is the Artistic Director of the Kangalee Arts Ensemble. A native New Yorker and Juilliard alumnus, he is the son of Black-Indian and Latino West Indian parents from Trinidad and has been creating radical theater independently since 1994. Inspired by Antonin Artaud, The Living Theater, Spalding Gray, The Black Arts Movement, and dramatists such as Amiri Baraka, Luis Valdez, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, he is a theater artist whose work is extremely personal as much as it is political.

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. 

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. 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 complexities of revolutionary art. He recently completed a three year devotion to the study and performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which was a spiritual self portrait as much as it was a new interpretation of Beckett’s classic play.

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

A dynamic solo performer, Kangalee is the first North American artist ever to receive an authorized commission to write and perform “SMILE” — an adaptation of Henry Miller’s mysterious short story, “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder” which premiered during 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 the ensemble’s ”masterpiece”, My Dying City Voll. II, which premiered in NYC January 2026. It exemplifies everything the Kangalee Arts Ensemble stands for, aesthetically and politically.

His latest original play, The Harm, a drama about the weaponization of language, premiered in the 19th Annual Midtown International Theatre Festival in July, 2026.

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