Dennis Leroy Kangalee

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, poet, actor, and guerrilla filmmaker from Queens, born to a Black  & Indian Trinidadian couple. An eternal outsider, Kangalee — which literally means “the dispossessed”– was a member of Group 25 at The Juilliard School in 1994, the same year he joined the Actors Studio.  He struggled with nervous breakdowns and crisis’ of faith at Juilliard.  While his time at the conservatory was not in vain (he established himself as an independent scholar by presenting the very first Black Theater History seminar in Lincoln Center in 1996!) he was devoted to becoming a monologist, as opposed to a Shakespearean actor, and he developed his unique voice as an artist, ultimately accepting his destiny as a spiritual descendant of Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Movement Revolutionary Theater ethos.  When he progressed to becoming a theater director during NYC’s final crumbling decade, pursuing neighborhood as opposed to Hollywood – it cost him dearly.  But it enriched hm in ways nothing else could.  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 the his 2001 cult film “As an Act of Protest,” a powerful line in the sand against racism and police brutality, DLK is a respected screenwriter/dramatist and very much an “actor’s actor,”  performing rarely, and always on his own terms.  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). 

Both personal and political, Kangalee’s art reflects his own anger and frustration as he sees the world’s injustice in an everyday observation. 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, his Visual Liberation film pedagogy introduced his transition into criticism and art theories in his own unique way after having been involved in a twenty year artistic resistance that, while proved to be futile, gave birth to independent artworks that laid the foundation for his very own ideas regarding radical art.  Fanonian readings of Black films, for example, are movies that either fulfill or betray the notion of decolonization in modern America. Visit Kangalee’s Cave for more information.  

He 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.  When not performing or writing, Dennis Leroy Kangalee teaches acting, gives seminars comparing political films to the resistance of American folk music, and helps to promote plays, artists, films, etc. that have been otherwise neglected by the mainstream.  A recipient of honorariums, most recently from 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. 

 An advocate of radical artists and visionaries who build upon the hallmarks of revolutionary art, politically and aesthetically, in a way that is highly personal — and therefore a reflection of one’s own conscience, he can be reached at kangalee76@gmail.com.

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For screenings, consulting, teaching, collaborations, or general inquiries please contact: kangaleearts@gmail.com. 

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He gave up slaying dragons

in an effort to cultivate inner gardens