Kwame Kwei-Armah OBE (born Ian Roberts; 24 March 1967[1] in Hillingdon, London)[2] is a British actor, playwright, director and broadcaster.

In 2005, Kwei-Armah became the second black Briton to have a play staged in the West End of London[a] when his award-winning piece Elmina's Kitchen transferred to the Garrick Theatre.

[4][5] Brought up in Southall, West London, he changed his name at the age of 19, after tracing his family history, through the slave trade back to his ancestral African roots in Ghana.

His father, Eric, moved to Britain in 1960, at a time when there was high unemployment in Grenada, and found work in London at the local Quaker Oats factory.

[9] As Ian Roberts, Kwei-Armah portrayed Duke, who was one of The Latchkey Children in the eponymous London Weekend Television series that was written by Eric Allen and aired in 1980.

His other television credits include appearances in episodes of Casualty′s sister series Holby City, the BBC's Afternoon Play, Between the Lines and The Bill.

in the 2006 BBC One revival of Robin Hood, as an ambitious town planner in Lewis, and in the feature film Fade to Black opposite Danny Huston, Christopher Walken and Diego Luna.

His musical selections included the political power-rap of Chuck D and his band Public Enemy, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley and Lord Kitchener.

Kwei-Armah said living with his parents was like existing with two very different types of theatre in the family home: he would be serving rum to his father and his pals, while his mother was hosting church meetings in the living-room.

Kwei-Armah is a member of the board of the National Theatre and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University in 2008, and in 2009 was a judge for the BBC World Service's International Radio Playwriting Competition.

[14] On 28 February 2011, he was named as the new artistic director at Baltimore's Center Stage theatre, replacing Irene Lewis, who had served in the position for 19 years.

[15] Kwei-Armah was involved in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, for which he wrote a piece based on a chapter of the King James Bible.

The all-black cast portrays the friendship between four of the most celebrated black icons in American history at a pivotal moment in their lives: 22-year-old boxing champion Cassius Clay, on the brink of becoming Muhammad Ali, celebrates his world heavyweight championship title with controversial civil rights activist Malcolm X, along with singer songwriter Sam Cooke and NFL champion footballer Jim Brown.

[21] On 2 July 2019, The Guardian published a story describing how Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley claimed they had been removed from the production of Tree.

[24] Allen-Martin and Henley claim that their creative input had included research, script-writing as well as the play's title, and that they were threatened with legal action if they went public with the story.