Age: 31
female
Joy Sunday is an Nigerian-American actress. She has performed in television notably in Dear White People and Wednesday. In film, she is known for side roles in Bad Hair, Shithouse, and Dog. Sunday was born in Staten Island, New York to a Nigerian family. She studied theater in high school at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City, before going to study at USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles and graduating with a degree in critical studies. Outside of academia, she worked as a filmmaker with Tribeca Film Institute on the side, working on several shorts.
SPRING, 2007 At twenty-six, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She’s in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother’s beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in. No one embodies this milieu more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza’s life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself. But when Alicia’s wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza’s precarious lives. Against the backdrop of a potentially life-changing presidential election and a looming once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis, Last Night in Brooklyn explores the dark compromise of the American Dream for people of color living, unknowingly, in the twilight of a cultural moment. It is a story about everything money can buy—and the destruction of what it can’t.
