Nikki M. James Nikki M. James

Tony Award Winner, Nikki M. James, is a first generation American, her mother hailing from Haiti and her father from St. Vincent and the Grenadines.  Along with her older brother Douglas, they settled in Livingston, NJ where her family still resides today.
 
It was apparent as early as kindergarten that Nikki was a performer.  As she got older she became heavily involved with community theatre productions, dance classes as well as gymnastics.  She dragged her parents to every Broadway production possible.  By the 7th Grade she took matters into her own hands and set out to become a professional actress.  She auditioned for J.Mitchell Management and was immediately put under contract.  The next few years she booked various projects and national commercials.
 
After graduating high school she then attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Musical Theatre program and continued to audition whenever she could.  She booked her first Broadway show The Adventures Of Tom Sawyerwhile still in college.  The show did not run for long and Nikki went back and finished her degree.  It didn’t take long for her career to start to take off.  She booked the starring ingénue role in House of Flowers at New York City Center’s Encore Series.  To follow would be the original cast of All Shook Up and Bernarda Alba at Lincoln Center Theatre where she was seen by Director Des McAnuff (Jersey Boys) who then cast her as Dorothy in his production of The Wiz at La Jolla Playhouse.  A role that would win her the 2006 Craig Noel Award for Theatrical Excellence. Nikki would next appear Off-Broadway in Walmartopia, a  musical farce about the ills of big-box stores and consumerism.  In 2008, Des McAnuff again called upon Nikki. Although a departure from her musical theater roots, Mr. McAnuff asked Nikki to take on classical theater at the prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Nikki played Juliet inRomeo and Juliet and starred opposite Christopher Plummer as Cleopatra in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra on the Festivals main stage. The latter production was so well received it was filmed for a theatrical release and national television airings in Canada. The film is also available on DVD. Nikki was ready to return to the musical world and was asked to become a part of a reading of a new musical comedy written by the creators and South Park and the composer of Avenue Q. This as yet untitled project would go on to be The Book of Mormon, which Nikki appeared in many other readings and workshops leading up its Broadway run opening March 2011 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. For her performance, she was awarded the TONY Award for Featured Actress in a Musical in 2011.
 
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