Frederick Keith Johnson

Born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in the working class city of Racine, Wisconsin; Frederick is an union affiliated actor who has experience in Theater, Television, Film, TV & Internet commercials as well as Commercial Print. Johnson has also served as a film critic and interviewer for Medium Rare TV & Film, a San Francisco based film review and interviewing on-line program focused on women and people of color in TV & film. Frederick has trained at the prestigious American Conservatory; the Chicago based Second City, studied in a yearlong improvisation program at the Player's Workshop in Chicago, IL and at The Berkeley Repertory School of Theatre, in Berkeley, CA. Over the years, Frederick has appeared in various TV shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, Trauma and the popular Investigation Discovery, "I (Almost) Got Away With It". He has also appeared in several regional and national commercials for organizations like University of Phoenix, Oakland's own Oaks Card Club, Umpqua Bank and the Bernard Law Group. While in college, Frederick majored in Civil Engineering at University the Wisconsin Milwaukee but soon realized that engineering wasn't his bag after two near fatal accidents, as an Engineering Intern, working for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. At that point, Frederick decided to change his major by exploring other options at different universities such as Ohio State, Morehouse College and Marquette University. During that same year, Frederick was approached by the United States Marine Corp at a job fair while walking through the student union. The US Marines were looking for young men who interested in aviation. After some serious deliberation, Frederick decided to give it a shot as he passed the avionics test, passed the physical and aced the physical fitness test. Subsequently, Frederick was given an opportunity to become a fighter pilot in the United States Marine Corp by completing two summer boot camps. Upon graduation, he would be commissioned as an Officer and sent to flight school. Frederick would later turned down that opportunity after receiving notice that he been accepted at Marquette University on scholarship. Frederick would go on to earn his BA in Economics from Marquette University, his MS in Computer Information Systems from Boston University. While at Marquette, Frederick was recognized as a McNair Scholar and a student leader through the local student government. He was also seen as one of few prominent Black voices of the student body during that time. Many of within the Marquette University Administration knew of Frederick's success both academic and social. As a result, Frederick and the Dean of Students became very good friends because of the some of the trouble that he had managed to stir up for himself on campus. In the spring of 2002, Frederick announced to the world that he was planning be an actor. No one took him serious at all, not even his closest friends. It wasn't until his friends and family saw him on TV in two national TV commercial and in the film "Getting' Grown" in 2004, that anyone thought this to be true. Frederick work in Los Angeles, Sacramento and throughout the San Francisco Bay area, but makes his home in the wine country of Temecula Valley, California with his wife and family, where he works for a Consulting firm as a Manufacturing IT Engineering Consultant, servicing the life science industries. Throughout his life, Frederick has always been very athletic and enjoys studying mixed martial arts but is a horrible golfer. In his free time, Frederick enjoys writing screenplays and short stories. As a kid, Frederick used to dream of one day owning a Porsche, but he once worked as a valet at a posh athletic club and nearly crashed an expensive 911 through the club's front lobby. Since that time, Frederick gave up on the all things Porsche and focused his sites on the ultimate driving machine, the BMW. However, after consistently being stopped by the police in Oakland, in San Francisco and even in Sacramento; Frederick quickly realized, despite what anyone has ever said, "Driving while Black" is very real. Even though Frederick did not respect being profiled while driving his BMW 745i, he had to respect what could have come of him if any one of those past situations had gone bad. Frederick now drives a Volkswagen Passat and is very happy that he has not been stopped by the authorities since.