Kenya / 2009 / 78mins / Documentary / English and Swahili

What is it like to be white in a black society? Agnes, a woman with albinism, overcomes the difficulties of being born with no pigment in a society that discriminates against the condition. In My Genes asks us to consider how it feels to be a member of one of the most hyper-visible and yet effectively invisible groups of people in a predominantly black society.

Lupita Nyong'o

Lupita Amondi Nyong’o is an award-winning actress, director and producer, born in Mexico, raised in Kenya and educated in the US. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama’s Acting program. She has worked on the production teams of critically acclaimed films, including The Constant Gardener (2005), directed by Fernando Meirelles, and The Namesake (2006), directed by Mira Nair. In 2007, she wrote, produced, directed, and edited her first major film, the award-winning documentary In My Genes. In 2009, Nyong’o was featured as the lead role in MTV’s hit TV series Shuga, an innovative campaign to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS and its stigma in developing countries. Her film debut as an actress was playing Patsey in acclaimed director Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave (2013), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2014. Lupita Nyong’o’s stage credits include playing Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, (Yale Repertory Theater), Sonya in Uncle Vanya, Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, as well as being in the original production of Michael Mitnick’s Elijah. In 2015, she starred in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the Off-Broadway, and later the Broadway play Eclipsed, written by Danai Gurira. She was nominated for a Tony Award for Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and won a theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance for Eclipsed. She also starred in the box office-shattering superhero flick Black Panther (2018). Later that summer, the actress was honored with induction into Hollywood's Walk of Fame class of 2019. Nyong'o went on to co-star in the comedy-horror Little Monsters, which premiered at Sundance in early 2019. She followed with a turn to scream-out-loud horror in Jordan Peele's Us, about a family confronted by a sinister group of doppelgängers. She is currently developing several projects including a television series based on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah, which she will produce and star in; Born a Crime, a film adaptation of Trevor Noah's memoir of the same name, in which she will play Noah's mother, Patricia.; and will also star alongside Viola Davis in The Woman King, a drama based on the Dahomey Amazons. Learn More