Danielle Brooks

Brooks was born in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, in a Christian family; her father was a deacon, and her mother, a minister. She began acting at the age of six in a nativity play put on by her church. For her final two years of high school, she attended South Carolina Governor\'s School for the Arts & Humanities, a selective arts high school. She studied drama at the Juilliard School and graduated in 2011.\n', '

After graduating from Juilliard, Brooks won roles in two theater productions: the Shakespeare Theatre Company\'s Servant of Two Masters, and Blacken the Bubble. She left both productions in 2013 to join the cast of the Netflix-produced television series Orange Is the New Black, a show about a women\'s prison based on Piper Kerman\'s memoir of the same name, as Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson. Her character Taystee was originally intended to be featured i…