If you’ve ever spent any time in The Shade Room on Instagram, you know what a powerhouse the cultural information hub is to its more than 29 million followers, known as roommates, which churns out Black celebrity news on an almost hourly basis.
Touting exclusives like Dwight Howard addressing Royce Reed’s threatening comments against him to thirst traps from Saweetie, the Shade Room is a bold space for the Black community with a record-breaking amount of engagement from its trusting roomies.
But behind all the bravado is the soft and humble voice of its owner and creator, Angelica Nwandu. A graduate of Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, the Nigerian-born beauty has also spent much time in the school of hard knocks.
“My earliest memories of my childhood were in Inglewood, California,” Nwandu tells LA Weekly. “My parents were immigrants from Nigeria who came here in the late 80’s. I lost my mother to domestic violence at the hands of my father. From there, I went into foster care and pretty much lived in every area in Los Angeles County. We just kept moving around.
“Let’s say I made it through. I had a lot of traumatic experiences in foster care. Recently, my four siblings and I are part of a class action lawsuit against the Department of Child and Family Services because they just ignored a lot of sexual, physical, and mental abuse that occurred in foster care. Some of the social workers are overburdened with cases, and I get that, but the result is that a lot of children are suffering in the system.”
Angelica Nwandu (Joyce Charat)
Undeterred by the trauma, Nwandu chooses to look back at her foster care experience as a positive one and says she wouldn’t be who she is now if she hadn’t gone through that adversity.
“I look back at the good things I learned, like being adaptable,” she says. “I had to move in with different families and had to learn how to adapt. It allowed me to pick up different experiences and cultures. We lived in an eclectic bunch of homes – from impoverished to Bel-Air. When Angelina Jolie was adopting children, she took us in. I credit her for showing me that you can have more in life. Overall I’m grateful for my story.”
Her story and the shooting star that became The Shade Room started 10 years ago.
Nwandu was a legacy applicant at LMU. She had older cousins who came from Nigeria and went there, and although she was put on the waiting list, she was bound and determined to get in. She wrote a letter to the president, and within a week, she was accepted.
“I never actually saw myself in the media, ever,” says Nwandu, who has the grace and stature reminiscent of Jolie, who currently stars in Maria on Netflix. “When I went to LMU, I wanted to be a screenwriter. I have always seen myself writing scripts and working in film and the movie industry. But my family was very strict about what they wanted us to study. It would have to be something like engineering, accounting or nursing. So originally, my degree was in accounting.”
She got a job as a bookkeeper at Motorcycle Performance Services at $13 an hour while still taking elective classes like screenwriting at LMU with teachers that included Hollywood heavyweight Philip Messina. Sure enough, one of the scripts she co-wrote with actress Jordana Spiro made it to the Sundance Film Festival, winning an award. Night Comes On was inspired by Nwandu’s life in foster care.
Audu Maikori of Chocolate City from left, Angelica Nwandu, and comedian Michael Blackson celebrating 20 years of the Nigerian record label over the BET Awards weekend (Yuki Tomita)
Between the urging of friends and her loathing of accounting, she quit the motorcycle gig and started experimenting with Instagram. She first opened a boutique on the platform and tried selling clothes. Juju’s Closet, named after her little sister, failed within six months.
“I was unemployed and had no money in the bank,” says Nwandu. “I’d always tell my friend what was happening in the media every day, and the friend said, why don’t you just start your own media company? That night I started researching ideas. It was just at the time when the blogging and www. industry were dying, and sites were closing down. Social media was just starting to disrupt it. So I opened up an Instagram page and I’ll tell you, from that first day, I just knew this was going to be something big.
“On the first day, I blogged 24 hours directly to Instagram, short little captions and a picture,” she says. “That first day I got 300 followers. By the end of the first week, it had 10,000 followers. It was growing so fast because it was just different. People were used to stuff being published directly to people’s feeds, and the people we were covering were already IG famous. At the time, you couldn’t go to websites to find out what was happening with influencers because they weren’t seen as celebrities. I was blogging about them and getting their audiences to come to us to find out what was happening behind the scenes of the influencers. It was something new that attracted a lot of people early on.”
She called it The Shade Room because shade was a word being used heavily in the Black community as offhand comments. But for Nwandu, it was really the truth room. As she puts it, sometimes the truth is misconstrued as shade, and it became a forum for brutally honest opinions.
She went from pushing out content 24 hours a day solo with no sleep to the media beast she runs now with 40 employees, which includes editorial, news, video and website teams. They work 40-hour shifts, open at 4 a.m. Eastern time and close around 9 p.m. Eastern time.
Because Nwandu listens keenly to her roomies, there have been plenty of pivots during that meteoric rise.
Angelica Nwandu (Joyce Charat)
“We started posting politics in 2020,” she says. “It happened after the George Floyd protests. We listened to our audience a lot, and during that time, we tried to continue posting celebrity news, but they wanted to talk about George Floyd. There was so much happening in our community that we wanted to focus on social justice. So we had to pivot. The writers kind of panicked and said, ‘Wait, we’re not trained for this kind of writing.’ Everybody had journalism degrees, but we trained them in celebrity news. They had to pivot completely to politics and social justice. So, we learned along the way.
“At that time I was under the idea that we had to learn whichever way our audience learned,” she says. “I mistakenly assumed that Black people were all Democrats. So we learned that way. As time went on, I noticed that in black culture, there are a lot of conservative ideals. A lot of them may identify as a Democrat, but when I hear their opinions on different issues, it’s conservative. You talk to them long enough and plenty of people have those conservative-leaning talking points. So when 2023 came around, we began to open the floodgates and said hey, we’re not here to influence you one way or the other, we’re just going to put the information out there and allow you to make your own decisions and I honestly think that’s how the media should go. We need to trust our audience to make their own decisions on who to vote for and give them unbiased information from each party.”
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris sat down and talked to The Shade Room. An invite was also extended to Donald Trump, who declined.
The Nigerian native’s ascent is just getting fiercer as 2025 kicks in. There will be short-form movies, festivals, products, and more on the horizon this year.
“When I think of a matriarch, a gracious soul, timeless mainstream media, resilience, inspiration, and beauty, it’s Angelica,” Beyond Our Kin CEO Ava Walker tells LA Weekly. “It was truly a special moment for our organization to honor her at our recent luncheon. Beyond Our Kin is a nonprofit organization that empowers foster youth, which Angelica helped start as the first donor. Since then she continuously helps make a tremendous impact in the lives of foster youth.”