Cree Summer

Cree Summer Francks (born July 7, 1969, in Los Angeles, California) is a Canadian-American actress, voice actress, and singer whose four-decade career has made her one of the most prolific and celebrated voice performers in the history of animation. Born in Los Angeles and raised on the Red Pheasant Reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada, she is the daughter of Canadian actor and musician Don Francks and Lili Red Eagle — an African American woman adopted into the Plains Cree First Nations — giving Cree a heritage that is both Black and Indigenous. She began her career at age 14 voicing Penny in Inspector Gadget (1983), and went on to voice over 400 animated characters across five decades, including iconic roles as Elmyra Duff in Tiny Toon Adventures, Susie Carmichael in Rugrats and All Grown Up!, Princess Kida in Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Numbuh 5 in Codename: Kids Next Door, Foxxy Love in Drawn Together, Valerie Gray in Danny Phantom, and Lizard in Spirit Rangers. In live action, she is beloved for playing the free-spirited Winifred 'Freddie' Brooks on the NBC sitcom A Different World (1988–1993), and more recently as librarian Rosalyn Inez on Abbott Elementary (ABC, 2024–). As a musician, she fronted the rock-soul band Subject to Change in the early 1990s and released the Lenny Kravitz-produced solo album Street Faërie in 1999. Her voice work has earned her an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Voice Performance for Spirit Rangers (2023), five Behind the Voice Actors Awards, and nominations for the Daytime Emmy and Annie Awards. She is a foundational figure in the representation of Black women in animation — having shaped the childhoods of generations of fans long before diversity in voice casting became an industry conversation.