Decima Francis was born in St Kitt's and came to the UK with her family in 1961. Francis was among the first four women to have directed at the Royal National Theatre. Decima Francis also founded the Roxbury Outreach Shakespeare Experience as both a theatre company and a schools outreach programme in 1988 in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts; they took their first production to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1989. She is now an anti-gang campaigner, having founded the From Boyhood to Manhood Foundation in 1996.