Genevieve Nnaji

Genevieve Nnaji (born 3 May 1979) is a Nigerian actress, producer, and director. She rose to prominence in Nollywood and won the Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 2005. Her debut as a director, *Lionheart*, was both the first Nigerian film acquired by Netflix as an original and the first movie Nigeria ever submitted for Oscar consideration. In 2011, the Nigerian government awarded her the Member of the Order of the Federal Republic for her impact on Nollywood. By 2020, after decades in the industry, she was featured alongside other celebrities and business figures in two books by Azuh Arinze, the publisher and editor in chief of *Yes International!* magazine.

Nnaji was born in Mbaise, Imo State, in southeastern Nigeria, and grew up in Lagos, in the southwest. She is the fourth of eight children, raised in a middle-class household where her father worked as an engineer and her mother taught nursery school. She attended Methodist Girls College in Yaba, Lagos, then earned a bachelor’s degree in creative arts from the University of Lagos. While still a student there, she began auditioning for Nollywood roles.

Her acting career started at age eight on the television soap opera *Ripples*. In 1998, at 19, she entered the Nigerian film industry with the movie *Most Wanted*. She went on to appear in films such as *Last Party*, *Mark of the Beast*, *Ijele*, and *Ijé: The Journey* (2010), eventually starring in over 200 Nollywood productions. In 2004, she was one of nine actors—dubbed the G8—banned for charging excessively high fees. That same year, she signed with Ghanaian label EKB Records and released her debut album, *One Logologo Line*, a mix of R&B, hip-hop, and urban music. She was also named the face of Lux in Nigeria in 2002.

In 2005, she won the AMAA for Best Actress in a Leading Role. By 2009, she was among Nollywood’s highest-paid female actors. She became the first actor to receive the Best Actress award at the City People’s Awards in 2001—a ceremony that had previously only honored politicians and business leaders—and the first to win Best Actress from the Censors Board of Nigeria in 2003. Oprah Winfrey referred to her as the Julia Roberts of Africa in 2009.