Adam Davenport

Author

At 15, Davenport wote a short story titled Home which was published in the anthology Looking Inward, for which he was presented with an Award of Achievement by former President George Bush, Sr. in 1999.^[1] He is also a two-time National NAACP ACT-SO Competition gold medal winner for Colors of the Rainbow (2000) when he was a junior at Marian Catholic High School,^[2] and for Blood at the Root: The Legacy of Billy Holiday's Strange Fruit (2001) when a senior.

Film and Stage

At 27, Davenport became the youngest director accepted into the Actors Studio Playwright/Directors Unit; his interview was with Martin Landau and Mark Rydell. He made his New York stage debut in the opera adaptation of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," directed by Michael Bergmann and opposite opera heavyweights Randal Turner, Adrienne Danrich and Anne-Carolyn Bird. In November 2016 he performed Morten Lauridsen's "Lux Aeterna" and the North American premiere of Howard Goodall's "Eternal Light: A Requiem" with an international choir at Carnegie Hall.^[3]

Davenport's short film Midnight Son, which he made as his thesis project while an undergraduate at Yale University, became the recipient of the Panavision New Filmmaker Award, a distinction shared by the first films of Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Jared Hess.^[4] Made by Davenport when he was twenty-one years old, the project was photographed by Clint Eastwood's cinematographer Tom Stern and starred Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, Jack Mulcahy and Tony nominee David Harbour.^[5]

In 2010, Davenport founded the production company First Lady Films with Leo.^[6] He was set make his feature debut with a film adaptation of John Kaye's novel The Dead Circus, but the project stalled in development due to the film's budget.^[7] Davenport left Los Angeles and began to work as an actor in New York City, where he began to garner notice for his range of quirky, off-beat and eccentric character portrayals. Per Sally Kirkland, who mentored Davenport since his early days in Hollywood, "He is a character actor in a leading man's body" .^[8]

In 2016, Davenport became the first African-American and openly gay actor to play Hercules onscreen when he was cast to play the mythic hero in Alex Ewen's musical feature film Project Olympus, produced by Road Warrior Entertainment.^[9] A few months later he signed with the label Independent Ear and released his debut single "My Return Address is You," featuring Shanica Knowles, in late January 2017; the track was released internationally via Universal Music Group and entered the charts at #7 on Dance Mix USA for the week ending 2/11/17. He subsequently became the first African-American producer to eponymously chart on Billboard for Electronic Dance Music after the song charted on the Dance Club chart for 10 weeks, peaking at #23 on September 23, 2017.^[10]

Future projects

Davenport is preparing to mount a stage revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night with an all-black cast starring Alfre Woodard.^[4] A production of the classic O'Neill play has only been staged once before with an all African-American cast, in 1982 with Earle Hyman, Ruby Dee, Thommie Blackwell and Peter Francis-James.^[11]

Awards and nominations

• NAACP ACT-SO gold medal for Best Writing, 2000 and 2001 ^[12][13]