Nicole Ari Parker

Nicole Ari Parker is an American actress and model. She is recognized for her work in film and television, including her roles in Boogie Nights, Remember the Titans, and Brown Sugar. On television, she is best known for starring as attorney Teri Joseph in the Showtime drama series Soul Food, Giselle Barker in Empire, and Lisa Todd Wexley in And Just Like That....

Parker was born on October 7, 1970, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Susan Parker, a health care professional, and Donald Parker, a dentist. The only child of divorced parents, she briefly attended a Montessori school before completing her secondary education at Roland Park Country School. At age 17, she won Best Actress in Maryland's high school theater competition. She also danced with The Washington Ballet Company before earning an acting degree from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1993.

Parker made her screen debut in the 1993 television film Other Women's Children. She starred in her first feature film in 1995 with the independent comedy-drama The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love and appeared in the television movie Divas. In 1997, she had a role in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights and appeared in The End of Violence. Her late 1990s screen credits included Spark, The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, 200 Cigarettes, Loving Jezebel, A Map of the World, Blue Streak, and the television movie Exiled: A Law & Order Movie.

In 2000, Parker starred opposite Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans, receiving an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture, and appeared in Dancing in September. That year, she also began playing Teri Joseph in Soul Food, a role she maintained until 2004 and which earned her five NAACP Image Award nominations for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series. She subsequently appeared in films such as Brown Sugar, King's Ransom, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Black Dynamite, Imagine That, and Pastor Brown.

Her television credits continued with starring roles in the sitcom Second Time Around, the legal drama The Deep End, and the first season of Murder in the First. In 2012, she made her Broadway debut as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She also appeared in the pilot Secret Lives of Husbands and Wives, held a recurring role on Revolution, and starred in the film Almost Christmas and the drama series Time After Time.

Parker joined the cast of Fox's Empire in 2017 as Giselle Barker, playing the character through the series finale in 2020. She held a recurring role on Chicago P.D. before joining the main cast of HBO Max's And Just Like That... as Lisa Todd Wexley in 2021, and appeared in the miniseries The Best Man: The Final Chapters in 2022. Outside of acting, Parker is an active Democratic Party member. She married actor Boris Kodjoe in 2005, and the couple has two children.