Adam Davenport movie list
A Billboard-charting artist and graduate of Yale, Adam Davenport has worked on such internationally-renowned stages as The Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and Theatre Row. Born in Harvey, Illinois, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, Davenport overcame many obstacles in his youth to graduate from Yale's film school cum laude and became a recipient of the Panavision New Filmmaker Award, a distinction shared by Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh on their first filmmaking efforts. At 26 he became the youngest member in the Playwright/Directors Unit of the Actors Studio: his interview was with Martin Landau. After working as a screenwriter in his twenties and optioning spec scripts to numerous A-list production companies including Arthur Sarkissan Productions (Rush Hour franchise) and Hugh Jackman's producing partner John Palermo, Davenport left Los Angeles and began to study acting in New York City under Milton Justice, who coached the likes of Mark Ruffalo, Benicio Del Toro, Kyra Sedgwick and Kathy Bates. It was on the stage where Davenport first began to garner notice for his range of quirky, off-beat and eccentric character portrayals, from a hot-tempered commodities broker who loves cocaine in Last of the Caucasians at The Barrow Group to a Trinidadian immigrant who manipulates women sexually to advance himself in Mustapha Matura's Nice at The New Perspectives Theatre. Says Academy-Award nominee and Golden-Globe winner Sally Kirkland: "Adam is a character actor in a leading man's body."
Adam made his New York stage debut in the 2015 opera adaptation of Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," directed by Michael Bergmann and produced at the Hecksher Theatre, the original site for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. The following year, he performed Lauridsen's "Luc Aeterna" and the North American premiere of Howard Goodall's "Eternal Light: A Requiem" with an international ensemble at Carnege Hall. Adam was subsequently cast to play Hercules in Alex Ewen's musical feature film Project Olympus, produced by Road Warrior Entertainment; according to Indiewire, he may be the first African-American actor to play the hero.
Davenport won an Independent Music Award at Lincoln Center and became the first African-American artist/producer to chart on Billboard for Electronic Dance Music after his debut single "My Return Address Is You" charted on the Dance Club chart for 10 weeks, where it surpassed tracks from the likes Zedd, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez.
Davenport recently co-starred on the HBO series High Maintenance and is performing in the Off-Broadway production of Naked Boys Singing and Verdi's Aida at The Metropolitan Opera.
Davenport was born and raised in the south burbs of Chicago, Illinois. At age fifteen, Davenport wrote 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. In the spring of 2003, he created the production company Bulldog Productions in response to the lack of filmmaking opportunities at Yale.
Davenport's short film Midnight Son (2007), which he made as his thesis project while an undergraduate at Yale University, became the recipient of the Panavision New Filmmaker Award. Made when he was twenty-one years old, the project was photographed by Clint Eastwood's cinematographer Tom Stern and starred Melissa Leo, Jack Mulcahy and Tony nominee David Harbour. As a director, Davenport has worked with six Academy Award nominees and two Tony nominees.
