Actor and photographer · Uganda
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine (born 1967) is a Ugandan-American actor, playwright and photographer. Best known for television and film roles in Treme, Heroes and Blood Diamond, he has photographed Uganda for decades; his pictures have been exhibited at the United Nations, the UCLA Fowler Museum and Museum Africa in Johannesburg, and projected in his one-man plays Biro and A Missionary Position.
Updated 2 min read
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine was born in 1967 in Hanover, New Hampshire, to Ugandan parents, and grew up partly in Kenya, where his mother taught psychology at the University of Nairobi. He trained as an actor and built a career in American television, theatre and film, with roles in Heroes, HBO's Treme and Blood Diamond.
Photography has run alongside his acting throughout. His series Boda Boda, photographs taken from the passenger seat of his father's car while travelling through Uganda, was shown at the Blue Sky Gallery in 2008. His subject is mainly Africa, and above all Uganda, which he has called his muse: photography is his way of connecting with his family's country. His photographs have been published in Vanity Fair, used in HBO's Six Feet Under, and exhibited at the United Nations, the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and Museum Africa in Johannesburg.
His work brings the two together. In Biro (2003), a one-man play about an HIV-positive Ugandan former rebel soldier, his own photographs of Uganda and Cuba are projected behind him; the play premiered at Uganda's National Theatre and toured to New York, London and across Africa. A Missionary Position (2012) turned to Uganda's LGBT community after the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
His feature documentary Memories of Love Returned (2025, 76 minutes, shown at Slamdance) grew out of a car breakdown in 2002 in the village of Mbirizi, where he came upon a photography studio run by Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo; a 2023 exhibition at The Platform Gallery set his work beside Kibaate's. In 2017 he recreated, with three of its members, a 1983 photograph of a family from Mbirizi.
How to look at his photographs: they are the work of someone returning, not arriving. Compare the pictures of Uganda with the portraits of Kibaate's sitters and ask who has the eye of the place and who the eye of the visitor. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
Blue Sky Gallery's page for Boda Boda, the PBS NewsHour and Slamdance pages on Memories of Love Returned, and the Platform Gallery's page on the 2023 show document his photography; check each for current displays. See our list of African photographers and East Africa.
