Richard Lawson is an actor, director, teacher, and empowerment leader with an extensive career spanning almost 60 years.  His first professional job was in the national company of “No Place to Be Somebody” with Ben Vereen and Philip Michael Thomas. He went on to receive the Drama Critics Awards for his work in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at the Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC) and “Streamers” at the Westwood Playhouse. Other memorable experiences included productions of “Fool for Love” at LATC, “Checkmates” at the Westwood Playhouse, the American premiere of “Hapgood” at The Doolittle Theater in Los Angeles, “The Mighty Gents”, “The Talented Tenth”, two different productions of “Othello”, and “The Exonerated” at the Actors Gang Theater in Los Angeles. 

His film work includes Steven Spielberg’s “Poltergeist”, “Scream Blacula Scream”, “Black Fist” (Originally titled “Bogard”), “Sugar Hill”, “Streets of Fire”, “Stick”, “The Main Event”, “Coming Home”, “Audrey Rose”, “Wag The Dog”, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”, “Guess Who”, and “For Colored Girls”, starring Janet Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Thandie Newton, Kerry Washington. Currently, he can be seen in Divorce in the Black (#1 globally on Amazon Prime), as a series regular on Beauty in Black, a sixteen-episode Tyler Perry series for Netflix. as well as The Black Hamptons and The Ms Pat Show on BET+. Television credits include: “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”, “Dynasty”, “Chicago Story”, “MacGyver”, “Parenthood”, “St. Elsewhere”, “Judging Amy”, “NYPD Blue”, and “Real Husbands of Hollywood”. He also created the part of ‘Lucas Barnes’ on the soap opera, “All My Children”. He recently starred in Tyler Perry’s “Divorce In The Black” on Amazon Prime, and is currently a series regular on Tyler Perry’s “Beauty In Black” on Netflix. Upcoming projects include Roc Nation’s “Aftershock: The Nicole Bell Story”.

In 1980, he began teaching classes for Milton Katselas, and in 2005, he created his own acting/empowerment studio called the Richard Lawson Studios. Stage Directing credits include: “No Place to Be Somebody”, “Othello”, “Death of a Salesman”, “Chicago”, “Heat”, “From the Heart of Love”, “Lullaby Lady”, “Driving Miss Daisy”, “Unfaithful”, “The Fisher King”, and “Excuse Me”. He directed the film entitled “Black Terror” written by Richard Wesley.