Marsha Stephanie Blake

Marsha Stephanie Blake is a Jamaican American actress who moved to the United States with her family in the late 1980s and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1996 before training in the graduate acting program at UCSD. She built her early reputation on Broadway and Off-Broadway stages in productions such as The Merchant of Venice, The Crucible and An Octoroon, and guest-starred on television series including Law & Order and The Good Wife. In 2015 she joined Orange Is the New Black as Berdie Rogers, sharing in the cast's Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble work in a comedy series. Her best known role came in 2019 as Linda McCray in Ava DuVernay's Netflix miniseries When They See Us, which brought her a Primetime Emmy nomination. Her films include Nasty Baby (2015), Crown Heights (2017), Luce (2019), See You Yesterday (2019), I'm Your Woman (2020) and Brother (2023), the last earning her a Canadian Screen Award nomination.