KANGALEE brings his entire life experience to whatever he does, bridging the personal and the political in everything he creates. And he maintains his belief that the truth in a rigged society can only come from an “outsider” perspective.

Born in Queens, NY to West Indian parents (African, Indian and Indigenous Arawak ancestry) and once known as THE NOMAD JUNKIE due to his peripatetic lifestyle and artistic promiscuity, DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE  was an original member of Group 27 at The Juilliard School (“Dennis Leroy Moore”) in 1994 before being ousted in 1997 when he became radicalized, “lost his mind” and formed his own theater company, Dionysus 2000. A year earlier, he established himself early as an outlaw autodidact by presenting the very first Black Theater History seminar in Lincoln Center in 1996, on the heels of August Wilson’s provocative “The Ground on Which I Stand” manifesto, and later studying the footsteps of the Black Arts Movement and the Living Theater, two towering influences on his conception of radical art.  He developed himself as a monologist, devouring works by Spalding Gray, Samuel Beckett, Eric Bogosian and Dick Gregory before finding his own voice as a writer.   

While many of his contemporaries went Hollywood, Kangalee went neighborhood — and never wavered from his commitment to the social responsibility of the artist.  An adept monologist and respected actor, he formally turned to directing in 1997, kick-started actors such as Damon Gupton and Morena Baccarin in the public eye.  These early artistic experiments downtown at the Ohio Theater (Elizabeth Wong’s China Doll starring Chris Hedge’s Voice Over Artist Eunice Wong) and Independent Art HERE led him to triumphs in Harlem at the National Black Theater with his 1999 revival of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, starring Ward Nixon (their first collaboration). 

Kangalee’s 2001 independent cult-classic film, As an Act of Protest , was a powerful line in the sand against racism and police brutality that ruffled so many feathers — the Giuliani administration did their best to suppress the film in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  It was the second of many acts of marginalization and erasure DLK has experienced.  Such experiences only deepened his commitment to combining conscientious acting with radical politics.

Very much an “actor’s actor,” (he workshopped Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape  successfully for nearly a whole year!) his performer instincts are extensions of his writing, which inform his approach to directing.  Kangalee has been obsessed with the conscience and duty of the actor and acting itself — a forever lone, misunderstood and monastic art form. 

Inspired by 20th century artist-critics like Amiri Baraka, John Berger, Antonin Artaud, and Lester Bangs Kangalee wrote film criticism for the Luminal Theater’s Wavelengths from 2022-2025.

A recipient of honorariums, including one from Princeton in 2015, he is one of the leading outsider (“non-academic”) film theorists and independent scholars of Black protest drama. His contribution to the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2021exemplifies his interest in mental health, trauma, and the healing power of art. His contribution to the critically acclaimed Fever Spores, a book about William S. Burroughs edited by Brian Alessandro and Tom Cardamone, with essays or interviews by Samuel Delaney, David Cronenberg, etc. – was published in 2022, the year he formed the Kangalee Arts Ensemble.  The Ensemble is a non-profit repertory company devoted to the fusion of classical theater ideas and radical politics, both in service of the liberation of the actor as an artist in their own right.

His 2024 drama The Life & Death of Art was the first original drama in NYC to speak out against the genocide in Gaza and even more provocatively it saw the decimation of the colonized mirrored in the officious and venal culture of the fine art world, the terrain in which the play takes place.

Kangalee is an advocate of artists and visionaries who build upon the hallmarks of art for social change in a way that is highly personal — and therefore a reflection of one’s own conscience. A 2024-2025 Artist-in-Action Fellow at The Action Lab, the Kangalee Arts Ensemble presented a rehearsal of his first major theatrical work My Dying City on May Day, 2025. (The final version of the play opened to massive success in January 2026 in NYC.)

Due to his success reviving two Samuel Beckett solo plays in Monterey, Dennis Leroy Kangalee was commissioned by the Henry Miller Memorial Library to adapt Miller’s exquisite parable about the artist’s struggle, The Smile at The Foot of The Ladder, to the stage for the Henry Miller in the 21st Century Symposium in Pacific Grove, California.  Collaborating with poet Magus Magnus, this is the first commission of its kind. It has been a lifelong goal to share with the public — the insights, inspirations, and heartbreak he felt when first reading Miller’s short story over 25 years ago. And it has forced him to get back to his roots: solo storytelling.

SMILE: A Clown’s Ascension premiered October 15th at the Asilomar Chapel in Pacific Grove, CA - as part of the Henry Miller in the 21st Century Symposium. It was a historic event.

Three months later, with help from an arts initiative grant from the Venturous Theater Fund, on January 15th in NYC his completed masterwork “My Dying City Vol.II (The Social Justice Suicide Hour)” premiered at the American Theater of Actors. In the tradition of Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Tony Kushner it embraced dialectics, tragedy, moral conscience, honest rage and ferocious humor — about the fascism encroaching upon our times. It was a landmark production and has ignited a whole new phase for Kangalee’s art, his work, and his ideas.

- St. Clare Mulligan