Zoe Saldana-Perego (born June 19, 1978), known professionally as Zoe Saldana, is an American actress and dancer. Following her performances with the FACES theater group, Saldana made her screen debut in an episode of Law & Order (1999). Her film career began a year later with Center Stage (2000), where she played a struggling ballet dancer, followed by a role in Crossroads (2002). Saldana's breakthrough came in 2009 with the roles of Nyota Uhura in Star Trek and Neytiri in James Cameron's Avatar (2009). The latter film received widespread acclaim, and is the highest-grossing film of all time. Saldana continued her career with films such as Colombiana (2011), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and both Star Trek sequels, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016).
Her father, Aridio Saldaña, was Afro-Dominican, while her mother, Asalia Nazario, is Puerto Rican. Saldana also has Lebanese and Haitian roots. She spent the majority of her early childhood growing up in Jackson Heights, New York. She was raised bilingual, speaking English and Spanish. She has two sisters, named Cisely and Mariel, and a half-brother named Nipo, known as "Nipo 809", who is a Dominican artist and producer. Her father died in a car crash when she was nine years old, and Saldana and her mother subsequently moved to the Dominican Republic.
Saldana discovered her love of dance in the Dominican Republic and enrolled in the ECOS Espacio de Danza Academy; she studied various forms of dance but describes ballet as her first passion. She told Vanity Fair that she quit ballet because she did not have the feet and had too much pride and ambition to just be in the corps de ballet. The family returned to New York after her sophomore year in high school. In 1995, she began performing with the FACES theater group in Brooklyn, which put on plays geared toward providing positive messages for teens via themes dealing with issues such as substance abuse and adolescent sexuality. Concurrently, she performed with the New York Youth Theater; her appearance in their production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat led a talent agency to recruit her. Her previous dance training, and her acting experience, helped her land her first film role, playing talented and headstrong ballet student Eva Rodriguez in Center Stage (2000).
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