the artist’s task is not to find an audience, but to leave behind something for an audience to find.
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Once known as THE NOMAD JUNKIE due to his peripatetic lifestyle and artistic promiscuity, DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE (known as Dennis Leroy Moore until 2003) is a writer, director, dramatist, actor, critic, teacher, and guerrilla filmmaker from Queens, born to a Black & Indian Trinidadian couple. An eternal outsider, Kangalee (his paternal birth name) — which literally means “the dispossessed”– was an original member of Group 25 at The Juilliard School in 1994 and he established himself as an independent scholar 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. The following year, he cultivated his prowess as a monologist — (“The Left-wing Spalding Gray!”) as opposed to a ‘traditional stage actor,’ (he adapted Dick Gregory routines as monologues) while simultaneously fusing the Black Arts Movement aesthetics with traditional occidental theater (“dramatic fusion”).
He established himself as a radical theater director during NYC’s final crumbling decade, his Dionysus 2000 Theater Lab was one of the most dynamic and politically progressive theater groups in NYC in the final days before 9/11. Best known for their landmark revival of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie at the National Black Theater and his 2001 cult film “As an Act of Protest,” 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.
Kangalee is a respected screenwriter/dramatist and very much an “actor’s actor,” performing rarely, and always on his own terms.
“Acting.” What does this really mean? For his entire life, Dennis Leroy Kangalee has been obsessed with the conscience and the duty of the actor – the supreme liberator !- a forever lone, misunderstood and monastic art form. “We need a language that keeps us storming both the imagination and the barricades for as long as we are not free,” he has written.
The Kangalee Arts Ensemble’s second season brings audiences a bold and provocative new original drama, The Life & Death of Art, about betrayal, art and capitalism amidst political crisis, starring Ward Nixon and Tessa Martin, and Dennis Leroy Kangalee in April, 2024. Our imminent and and revolutionary performance of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, starring Che Ayende has been much anticipated and kicks off in Fall, 2024 — click here for more information!
He is the author of “Lying Meat & Other Poems Beneath The Oil,” (2010) and experimental hybrid works such as his ‘punk-performance’ “Gentrified Minds,” a virulent demonstration against the gentrification and the globalization of the world, as well as numerous screenplays which he developed for Speller Street Films (Wilmington on Fire).
His point-of-view is always from that of the underdog and he believes that art should illuminate, as well as combat, the forces of apathy and corporate values rampant within the 21st-century zeitgeist.
In 2019, Kangalee’s Visual Liberation film pedagogy introduced his transition into criticism and art theories in his own unique way — comparing political films to the resistance of American folk music. Visit Kangalee’s Cave for more information.
Crawling out of the wreckage of the pandemic, Dennis Leroy Kangalee recently embarked on a year-round workshop of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which culminated in an end of the year performance at Studio 111 in November, 2022 and is currently working on a documentary about that experience.
Inspired by artist-critics like Amiri Baraka, John Berger, Antonin Artaud, and Lester Bangs he writes for the Luminal Theater’s Wavelengths.
A recipient of honorariums, including Princeton in 2016, he is one of the leading outsider (“non-academic”) film theorists and an independent scholar of Black protest drama. His contribution to the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2021, with psychologists Eric Greene and Nisha Gupta, exemplifies 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, with essays or interviews by Samuel Delaney, David Cronenberg, etc. – was published in 2022, the year he formed the Kangalee Arts Ensemble. In 2023, he began offering dramaturgical services and consulting to dramatists, and resumed private acting coaching to actors.
He is currently at work on a new original drama, The Life & Death of Art, which shall reunite him with Ward Nixon after 25 years this spring and next fall’s radical stage adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, slated for a premiere in November-December 2024 with Che Ayende.
An advocate of artists and visionaries who build upon the hallmarks of revolutionary art, politically or aesthetically, in a way that is highly personal — and therefore a reflection of one’s own conscience.
Art is the highest form of non-violent resistance. Support Living Artists or else you will see no visions and receive no prophecies.
For screenings, consulting, teaching, collaborations, or general inquiries please contact: kangaleearts@gmail.com
Dennis Leroy Kangalee 
Pure brilliance in breath, step, soul and purpose…thank you for gifting through searching