Yara Shahidi, the actress who spent ten years as Zoey Johnson and now starts again in other people’s films

Yara Shahidi

Photo: ColliderVideo / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 10, 2000 Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Occupation	Actress and producer
Known for	Salt, PAW Patrol: The Movie, Smallfoot
Awards	Max Mara Face of the Future Award

For ten years, the most famous thing about Yara Shahidi was a young woman who does not exist. Zoey Johnson, the eldest daughter of the Johnson family in black-ish, grew up on screen at the same pace as the actress playing her, from a dry, unimpressed high schooler to a college student carrying her own series, grown-ish. Along the way Shahidi became several things the character never was: a Harvard graduate, a fixture of fashion covers, a youth-voting organiser whom Time listed among the most influential teenagers in the country.

The question her career is answering now is what she is as an actress once Zoey is gone. Her answer, so far, is not a new vehicle built around her face. It is a string of roles inside other directors’ films: a Catherine Hardwicke drama about homeless kids in Venice, a Netflix comedy led by Jennifer Garner, a Jason Statham action sequel and a nine-minute animated short that doubles as an experiment in how cartoons will be made.

A photographer’s daughter

The Minneapolis household she was born into on February 10, 2000 already lived half inside the image business. Her father, Afshin Shahidi, an Iranian-born photographer, was one of Prince’s principal photographers, and Prince kept a signed picture of the little girl in his editing suite at Paisley Park. Her mother, Keri Salter Shahidi, who is of African American and Choctaw heritage, would later become her producing partner. Yara is a Persian name usually glossed as someone close to the heart, and the rapper Nas is a cousin, once removed.

The family moved to California when she was four, following her father’s work. By six she was in commercials and print campaigns for McDonald’s, Ralph Lauren, Target, GapKids and Disney, often shooting alongside her mother and her younger brother Sayeed, who also went on to act and model; a second brother, Ehsan, completes the family. Her first screen appearance was a small part in an episode of HBO’s Entourage in 2007.

A child actor with good instincts

The film debut came in 2009 opposite Eddie Murphy in the Paramount comedy Imagine That, as the daughter whose imaginary world starts handing her father uncannily accurate financial advice. The part earned her a Young Artist Award nomination for best leading young actress. She was the girl next door to Angelina Jolie‘s character in Salt in 2010, turned up in Butter, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2011, and shared scenes with Tyler Perry in the thriller Alex Cross in 2012.

Television kept her busy in the same years. She had a recurring role in the short-lived ABC comedy In the Motherhood, guest spots on Cold Case and Wizards of Waverly Place, a regular part as Chloe Johnson in the syndicated sitcom The First Family, and two episodes of Scandal in which she played the teenage Olivia Pope. None of it was a breakthrough. All of it taught her to hold a scene next to adults who were used to owning it.

Zoey Johnson, twice

Kenya Barris cast her in 2014, at fourteen, as Zoey, the eldest child of the characters played by Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross in black-ish. The ABC comedy used an upper-middle-class Black family in Los Angeles to argue, week after week, about what fitting in costs. Zoey was written as the child least bothered by the question, phone in hand and bored by her father’s anxieties, and Shahidi played that detachment so dryly that the jokes landed on everyone around her. The first season won her the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series; a Gracie Award for a breakthrough role and the BET YoungStars Award followed.

ABC’s decision to give Zoey her own show turned a supporting part into a lead. grown-ish premiered on Freeform on January 3, 2018 and sent the character to college, trading family satire for the messier comedy of dorm rooms, friendships and bad decisions. Shahidi carried it for five seasons, with three NAACP Image Award nominations for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series, and then stepped back to executive producer and recurring guest for the sixth and final season, which moved the centre of the show to other students.

Harvard, on her own schedule

While she was fronting a network series, she applied to Harvard. She finished high school through Dwight Global Online School in 2017, was admitted that year with a letter of recommendation from Michelle Obama, took a gap year and enrolled in 2018. She graduated in 2022 with a degree in social studies and African American studies, while grown-ish stayed on the air through all four years of study.

Around the same time she built a public role that had nothing to do with a script. With the social publisher NowThis she founded Eighteen x 18, a platform to get people her own age to vote for the first time, and with the Young Women’s Leadership Network she set up Yara’s Club, an online mentoring programme aimed at breaking poverty through education. Time put her on its list of the most influential teenagers of 2016; she signed with Women Management that year, and in September 2019 she was one of fifteen women on the cover of the British Vogue issue guest-edited by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. An Adidas collaboration and Dior’s Stand with Women campaign came in 2021.

The lead-role problem

This is where the public figure and the screen record part ways. Shahidi became a recognisable face faster than she became a proven film lead, and the films she has carried show it. The Sun Is Also a Star, her first adult lead, adapted Nicola Yoon’s novel for Warner Bros. and MGM in 2019; she played Natasha Kingsley, a Jamaican-born New Yorker facing deportation on the day she falls in love. Reviews were mixed, and the film grossed about 6.8 million dollars worldwide. Much of the rest of that stretch went to voice work: Brenda in Smallfoot, Melanie in Fearless, Kendra Wilson in PAW Patrol: The Movie, Callie in My Father’s Dragon.

Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy gave her the most visible film role of her career and the loudest argument about it. When she was revealed as Tinker Bell, part of the online reaction was openly racist, the same wave that had met Halle Bailey’s Ariel; another part, from critics with no such motive, called the casting a lazy race-swap standing in for original stories about Black characters. Shahidi answered the first group with a shrug, telling The Face that as a Black person you simply expect it, and the second with an argument: that inclusion is too often treated as a threat to a story’s quality rather than something that can be woven into it. The film went straight to Disney+ in April 2023, which meant the debate travelled further than the performance.

Later that year she starred in and executive produced Sitting in Bars with Cake, playing Jane, a law student who becomes her best friend’s caregiver after a cancer diagnosis. It was her most substantial dramatic role, and the notices were warm, but the consensus was that Odessa A’zion, as the friend, took the film; Carla Meyer of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that their friendship was its most authentic element. Shahidi still earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture, and she also appeared that spring in Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ climate anthology.

Yara Shahidi and Odessa A’zion in Sitting in Bars with Cake — Yara Shahidi and Odessa A’zion in *Sitting in Bars with Cake* (2023)

7th Sun and the work behind the camera

The producing side started earlier than most people assume. She was a co-producer of Hair Love, Matthew A. Cherry’s short about a Black father learning to do his daughter’s hair, which won the Oscar for best animated short. In 2020 she and her mother launched their company, 7th Sun, with a deal at ABC Studios; the first projects were Smoakland, a comedy pilot for Freeform, and an adaptation of Cole Brown’s memoir Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World.

In 2024 the company came aboard as executive producer of Paint Me a Road Out of Here, Catherine Gund’s documentary about Faith Ringgold’s For the Women’s House, a mural painted in 1971 for the women held at Rikers Island and moved, half a century later, to the Brooklyn Museum. In November 2023 Women in Film had given her its Max Mara Face of the Future Award, making her the eighteenth actress to receive it, an honour that pointedly rewards careers at a turning point.

2026: an ensemble player by choice

Her current slate reads like a deliberate change of scale. Street Smart, directed by Catherine Hardwicke and written with Nic Sheff, premiered at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas on June 18, 2026. It follows young unhoused skaters and musicians in Venice, California, the neighbourhood where Hardwicke shot Lords of Dogtown; Shahidi plays Stella in a cast that includes Isabelle Fuhrman, Michael Cimino, Marcia Gay Harden and the first-time actor Isiah Hilt. The film is still looking for a distributor.

The same month, at the Tribeca Festival, she was the lead voice of ChikaBOOM!, c. Craig Patterson’s nine-minute animated short about Chika Batstone, a young magician who lets a chaotic creature loose in New York, with Natasha Lyonne, Daveed Diggs, Roy Wood Jr. and Tika Sumpter. The short is also a test case: Asteria and Moonvalley made it with a hybrid pipeline that mixes hand-drawn 2D, CG animation and generative-AI tools, and brought in the production designer Hannah Beachler and the costume designer Ruth E. Carter. For an actress who has argued in public about who gets to be inside a fairy tale, putting her voice on one of the first studio-grade cartoons made partly with AI is a choice that will be read closely.

The larger releases are still ahead. In March 2026 she joined One Attempt Remaining, Kay Cannon’s Netflix comedy about a divorced couple hunting for the lost password to a cryptocurrency fortune, starring Jennifer Garner, John Cena and Kate McKinnon. Then comes The Beekeeper 2, Timo Tjahjanto’s sequel with Jason Statham, shot at Shepperton Studios in the autumn of 2025, with her role still kept under wraps; Amazon MGM Studios opens it in the United States and the United Kingdom on January 15, 2027, a day after its German release. She has also been attached to Bloom, Cole Swanson’s first feature, a romance set in Tuscany with Kedar Williams-Stirling, Keith Powers and Renée Elise Goldsberry.

Off screen, the fashion calendar has kept her visible between releases: the Peabody Awards red carpet in May, and a campaign this year as a face of Jean Paul Gaultier’s Divine Couture fragrance.

When The Beekeeper 2 opens in January, it will be her first action sequel, and she will be one name on a crowded poster. That is the bet she is making at twenty-six: that the way to stop being Zoey Johnson is not to find another Zoey, but to spend a few years disappearing into other people’s films until audiences stop looking for the character and start looking at the actress.

Featured Films

Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) — as Tinker Bell

Sitting in Bars with Cake (2023) — Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) — as Tinker Bell

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