"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..."

A triple threat,  Dennis Leroy Kangalee is a writer-director-actor 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 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. 

He teaches acting classes and provides private coaching. 

His 2024 play The Life & Death of Art was the most dangerous play performed in NYC in April of 2024 as it was the very first American drama to protest the genocide in Gaza and equate an alliance between Black Americans and Palestinians. 

He is a proud 2024-2025 Artist-in-Action fellow at the Action Lab in NYC and workshopped early versions of a play to premiere in NYC in 2026 entitled My Dying City (or: The Social Justice Suicide Hour).

Currently, he is working on a commission to write and perform an adaptation of Henry Miller’s mysterious short story, “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder” - about a romantic clown who is forced to give up performing because his audience no longer understands his art - for the Henry Miller Symposium in October, 2025 in Big Sur, CA.

dennisleroykangalee.com