Brandon Victor Dixon

Stage actor Brandon Victor Dixon established himself as both a dynamic presence in major musical theater productions, including Tony-nominated turns in "The Color Purple" and "Shuffle Along," as well as a producer with such Tony-winning shows as the 2014 revival of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" to his credit. Born in Gaithersburg, Mississippi in 1981, Dixon participated in both sports and school productions while a student at St. Albans School, and continued to pursue his theater education at Columbia University, where he won the I.A.L. Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts. Dixon also won a 1999 scholarship to attend the British American Drama Academy at Balloil College in Oxford, England; he returned to America to make his professional stage debut in 2003 as the adult Simba in the national tour of "The Lion King." Two years later, he earned his first Tony nomination for creating the role of Harpo in the 2005 Broadway run of "The Color Purple." The acclaim afforded by the Tony-nominated musical led to Dixon's casting in vibrant, complicated roles in several major productions: he played the legendary R&B singer Ray Charles in "Ray Charles Live" at the Pasadena Playhouse in 2007, then originated the role of Haywood Patterson, one of the key members in a historic trial, in the 2010 Off-Broadway run of John Kander and Fred Ebb's "The Scottsboro Boys." After a stint in a 2011 Off-Broadway production of "Rent," Dixon returned to Broadway in 2013 to play recording industry titan Berry Gordy in "Motown: The Musical," which netted him a Drama League Award nomination. He then reprised Haywood Patterson for the West End production of "Scottsboro Boys" in 2014. During this period, Dixon also established himself as a theater producer by founding WalkRunFly Productions, a company devoted to supporting young actors through musical theater, which established itself in 2014 with a Drama Desk-nominated revival of "Of Mice and Men" and the Tony-winning Broadway run of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" that same year. Dixon then returned to acting in "Shuffle Along; or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed," which bowed on Broadway in 2016. For his turn as jazz pioneer Eubie Blake, Dixon received his second Tony nomination.