Issa Rae

Jo-Issa Rae Diop (born January 12, 1985), credited professionally as Issa Rae, is an American actress, writer, and producer.

In 2007, Rae graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in African and African-American Studies.

As a college student, she made music videos, wrote and directed plays, and created a mock reality series called Dorm Diaries for fun.

At Stanford, Rae met Tracy Oliver, who helped produce Awkward Black Girl and starred on the show as Nina.

After college, Rae received a theater fellowship at The Public Theater in New York City.

Oliver and Rae started taking classes together at the New York Film Academy.

Since 2011, Rae has continued to develop her YouTube channel, which features various short films, web series, and other content created by black people.

Rae worked odd jobs and at one point was struggling to decide between business school and law school, but abandoned both prospects when Awkward Black Girl gained wider popularity in 2011.

Rae's web series Awkward Black Girl premiered on YouTube in 2011.

The show follows the life of J (played by Rae) as she interacts with co-workers and love interests who place her in uncomfortable situations.

The story is told through a first-person narrative as J usually reveals how she feels about her circumstances through voice-over or dream sequence.

The series went viral through word of mouth, blog posts, and social media, resulting in mainstream media coverage and attention.

In an effort to fund the rest of the first season, Rae and producer Tracy Oliver decided to raise money for the series through Kickstarter.

On August 11, 2011, they were awarded $56,269 from 1,960 donations and released the rest of season one on Rae's YouTube channel.

Rae partnered with Pharrell and premiered season two of the series on his YouTube channel iamOTHER.

Rae began releasing other content on her original channel, predominantly created by and starring people of color.

In 2013, Awkward Black Girl won a Shorty award for Best Web Show.

Rae created Awkward Black Girl because she felt the Hollywood stereotypes of African-American women were limiting and she could not relate to them:

"I've always had an issue with the [assumption] that people of color, and black people especially, aren't relatable. I know we are."

By using YouTube as her forum, Rae was able to have autonomy of her work because she writes, films, produces, and edits most of her work.

Her 2015 memoir, titled The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, became a New York Times bestseller.

Founder of Hoorae Media, she achieved wider recognition as the co-creator, co-writer, and star of the HBO television series Insecure (2016–2021), for which she was nominated for multiple Golden Globes Awards and Primetime Emmy Awards.

Rae first garnered attention for her work on the YouTube web series Awkward Black Girl.

Rae has also starred in feature films, with roles in the drama The Hate U Give (2018); the fantasy comedy Little (2019); the romance The Photograph (2020); the romantic comedy The Lovebirds (2020); the comedy thriller Vengeance (2022); and the comedies Barbie and American Fiction (2023), receiving nominations at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and Critics' Choice Movie Awards with the cast.

She also voiced Jess Drew / Spider-Woman in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) and Beyond the Spider-Verse (upcoming).

In 2018 and 2022, Rae was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world, and in Forbes '30 Under 30' list in the entertainment section.

She was recognized with the Peabody Trailblazer Award and the Producers Guild of America Visionary Award.

Jo-Issa Rae Diop was born in Los Angeles, California.

Her father, Abdoulaye Diop, is a pediatrician and neonatologist from Senegal, and her mother, Delyna Marie Diop (née Hayward), is a teacher from Louisiana.

Her parents met in France, when they were both in school.

She has four siblings.

Her father has a medical practice in Inglewood, California.

The family lived in Dakar, Senegal, during some of her childhood.

She was raised mostly in Potomac, Maryland, where she grew up with "things that aren't considered 'black,' like the swim team and street hockey and Passover dinners with Jewish best friends."

Rae was raised Catholic, her mother's faith.

When Rae was in sixth grade, her family moved to the affluent View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she attended a predominantly black middle school.

Rae graduated from King Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science, where she started acting.

Her parents divorced when she was in high school.

Rae is fluent in French.

Rae provided the voice work for the short film Hair Love, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2020.