Laverne Cox is an American actress and LGBT advocate. She rose to prominence with her role as Sophia Burset on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, becoming the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in an acting category, and the first to be nominated for an Emmy Award since composer Angela Morley in 1990. In 2015, she won a Daytime Emmy Award in Outstanding Special Class Special as executive producer for Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, making her the first trans woman to win the award. In 2017, she became the first transgender person to play a transgender series regular on U.S. broadcast TV as Cameron Wirth on CBS's Doubt.

Orange Is the New Black is an American comedy-drama television series created by Jenji Kohan for Netflix. The series is based on Piper Kerman's memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (2010), about her experiences at FCI Danbury, a minimum security federal prison. Produced by Tilted Productions in association with Lionsgate Television, Orange Is the New Black premiered on Netflix on July 11, 2013. Its seventh and final season was released on July 26, 2019.