Questlove

Cast · Director

Born

January 20, 1971 · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Birth name

Ahmir Khalib Thompson

Academy Award-winning filmmaker, drummer, DJ, producer, director, culinary entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, and member of The Roots - Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, is the unmistakable heartbeat of Philadelphia's most influential hip-hop group. He is the Musical Director for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where his beloved Roots crew serves as house band. Beyond that, this 6-time GRAMMY Award winning musician's indisputable reputation has landed him musical directing positions for everyone from D'Angelo to Jay-Z. Questlove made his directorial debut with the Academy Award winning feature documentary Summer of Soul. The movie broke the record for the highest-selling documentary to come out of Sundance, and it has since gone on to win "Best Feature Documentary" at the 2022 Academy Awards, "Best Documentary" at the 2022 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) and "Best Music Film" at the 2022 Grammy Awards, as well as a Peabody Award. In addition, Summer of Soul was crowned the "Best Movie of 2021" by The New York Times and included among the "best of the year" by The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone and more. Outside of Summer of Soul, Questlove partnered together with Black Thought of The Roots to launch a production company, Two One Five Entertainment. Together, the pair announced a first-look deal with Universal Television to develop scripted and non-scripted programming. In 2022, the company executive produced the acclaimed feature documentary Descendant about the historic discovery of The Clotilda-the last known slave ship to arrive in America illegally transporting enslaved Africans. The documentary, which made its world premiere at Sundance in 2022, was acquired by Netflix and Higher Ground-President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's production company. The film earned an impressive three nominations for "Best Documentary Feature," "Best Director," and "Best Historical Documentary" and took home the award for "Best Historical Documentary" at the 2022 Critics Choice Documentary Awards. It also received a nomination for "Outstanding Documentary" for the 2023 NAACP Image Awards and was also named one of the "Top 5 Documentaries" of 2022 by the National Board of Review. Questlove's web series, Quest for Craft, produced by Two One Five and launched in partnership with the single malt whiskey brand, The Balvenie, took home a Webby Award in 2023. Up next, Questlove will make his feature film directing debut with a live-action hybrid re-imagining of The Aristocats for Walt Disney Studios. Two One Five is set to produce the film alongside Olive Bridge. Questlove has written multiple books, including the New York Times bestsellers Mo' Meta Blues, Creative Quest, Music is History, and The Rhythm of Time, as well as the GRAMMY nominated audio books Music Is History and Creative Quest. Expanding his literary endeavors, in 2023 he launched his own book imprint, AUWA Books, within MCD Books, a publishing division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The imprint will publish both nonfiction and fiction on a wide range of topics.