She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her debut film role as Patsey in 12 Years a Slave (2013).

Lupita Nyong'o (born March 1, 1983, in Mexico City, Mexico) is a Kenyan-Mexican Oscar-winning actress who holds citizenship in Kenya, Mexico, and the United States. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her debut film role as Patsey in 12 Years a Slave (2013), becoming the first Mexican actress to win an Oscar. Her name is pronounced loo-PEE-tah NYAWN-goh, and as a Pisces born on March 1, she has starred in major films including Black Panther (2018, 2022), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Us (2019), A Quiet Place: Day One (2024), and The Wild Robot (2024).

Born in Mexico City on March 1, 1983, to Kenyan parents Peter Anyang' Nyong'o (a politician and professor) and Dorothy Ogada Buyu, Lupita returned to Kenya before her first birthday when her father became a professor at the University of Nairobi. She grew up in Nairobi speaking multiple languages including English, Swahili, Spanish, and Luo, having spent seven months in Mexico at age 16 specifically to learn Spanish. She made her stage debut at 14 as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet with the Nairobi-based Phoenix Players, earned a film and theatre degree from Hampshire College, and graduated from Yale School of Drama with a master's in acting in 2012.

Lupita Nyong'o speaks four languages fluently: English, Spanish, Swahili, and Luo, reflecting her multinational upbringing across Kenya, Mexico, and the United States. She is the second of six children in an artistic family, with siblings including Tavia Nyong'o (a New York University professor), Kwame Nyong'o (an animator), and Isis Nyong'o (named one of Africa's most powerful young women by Forbes). She identifies as both Kenyan and Mexican, addressing her Latino identity by explaining that while she was born in Mexico and speaks Spanish, her cultural roots are primarily Kenyan and African; she advocates for women's rights, animal rights, and historic preservation, and wrote the children's book Sulwe (2019), which became a New York Times bestseller.