Guest Speaker
Dr. Malik Yoba
Actor | Director | Musician | Author | Entrepreneur | Educator | Philanthropist | Social Justice Warrior
IN THE BEGINNING...
At the age of thirteen, Yoba was a member of The Metropolitan Opera Children’s Theater Guild and at age sixteen he worked with The Negro Ensemble Company. His stage credits include The Atlantic Theater Company’s The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner, The New Group s production of Everything s Turning Into Beautiful with Daphne Rubin Vega and The Delaware Theater Company’s The Piano Lesson.Although this 3x NAACP Image Award winning actor offers over three decades of commitment to the arts with over fifty film credits and more than a dozen lead roles in network/cable television series, he considers himself a community and youth advocate first.
Born in the South Bronx and raised in Harlem, it was his debut in the 1993 Disney classic Cool Runnings and his performance as NYPD Detective J.C. Williams in the groundbreaking nineties police drama, New York Undercover (FOX), that catapulted Malik into the fabric of American culture. Upcoming 2025 projects include Kings of JoBurg (Netflix) and Family Business (BET).
A serial entrepreneur, he is the founder and CEO of Yoba Development, a diversified portfolio company specializing in real estate, education, and media. As a mission-driven firm, they are committed to building human capacity through education and media while simultaneously pursuing sustainable, affordable and market rate mixed-use development projects in transitioning neighborhoods. Yoba Development has active real estate projects in New York, Baltimore, Augusta GA, Chicago and Charleston.
In 2022, Malik received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Livingstone College. In 2023, he co-founded Yoba Global Solutions a federal contracting business with several of his family members where he serves as Head of Business Development and in 2024 was named to the U.S. EXIM Bank Advisory Board for Sub- Saharan Africa .