Tatyana Ali is a Broadway-trained actress, singer, activist and graduate of Harvard University. Audiences best recognize the New York native as Ashley, the youngest in the Banks household on NBC’s hit comedy, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Nominated for the NAACP Image Award in 1993 and 1994, she won the award in 1995 for “Outstanding Youth Actor”. She is also the recipient of the 1995 and 1997 Hollywood Reporter Young Star Award for “Best Actress in a Comedy Series”. Now in worldwide syndication, Fresh Prince has secured Tatyana Ali’s place in pop culture history.
Tatyana has since appeared in numerous films, including: Paramount Pictures’ Kiss the Girls, starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd; Sony Pictures’ The Brothers with Morris Chestnut and D.L. Hughley; famed Japanese director Takeshi Kitano’s English-language gangster film, Brother, a Sony Pictures Classics film, and Jerry Bruckheimer’s Glory Road. Nora’s Hair Salon II, the follow up to 2002’s Nora’s Hair Salon, aired on BET and was one of the highest rated movies in the network’s history, second to John Singleton’s Hustle and Flow.
Tatyana Ali’s voice hit the airwaves in 1998 when she recorded her debut album, “Kiss the Sky”, under Epic/MJJ. The hit single, “Daydreamin’”, earned Tatyana a gold record, and the follow-up single, “Boy You Knock Me Out”, went silver in the U.K., earning Tatyana the coveted opening act spot for both *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys on their world tours.
In 1999, Tatyana paid homage to “Sesame Street,” the kids’ show that propelled her television career, by recording “Precious Wings” for “The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland” soundtrack. The recording won the Grammy for “Best Musical Album for Children”.
An inspiration to her millions of fans, this Educating Young Minds Award recipient began canvassing the country as a
surrogate for Barack Obama in November 2007, speaking to college students and minority youth about the importance
of voting. To bring attention to the Senator’s presidential campaign, she sang in the Emmy-winning Internet music video, “Yes We Can”, featured along with will.i.am, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Nick Cannon and Scarlett Johansson. The video has received more than 25 million views on You Tube to date. She also appeared in the follow-up will.i.am video, “It’s a New Day,” which premiered on The Oprah Winfrey Show following Obama’s win. Tatyana continues her advocacy work as spokesperson for the Millennium Momentum Foundation, an organization dedicated to educating and professionally developing young people for leadership roles that will impact their
communities.
When not working on her hotly anticipated follow-up album, “The Light”, Tatyana stars as Roxanne on CBS’s The Young and The Restless. Earlier this year, TVOne crowned Tatyana their new host for TVOne Access, an entertainment news show developed exclusively for the cable network by the producers of Access Hollywood. Tatyana will also return to the silver screen in the Guillermo del Toro production, Mother and Child, alongside Naomi Watts and Samuel L. Jackson. Tatyana's production company, HazraH Entertainment, is currently filming a scripted web show about the misadventures of 20-somethings in black Hollywood, which will begin airing worldwide in the coming months.
