Issa Rae

## Season History

**Jo-Issa Rae Diop** was a houseguest on *Big Brother: Barbie the Movie*.

## Biography

**Jo-Issa Rae Diop** (born January 12, 1985), credited professionally as **Issa Rae**, is an American actress, writer, and producer. Rae first garnered attention for her work on the YouTube web series *Awkward Black Girl*. 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 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*.* Her 2015 memoir, titled *The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl*, became a *New York Times* bestseller. In 2018 and 2022, Rae was included in the annual *Time* 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
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 comedy *Barbie* (2023). She also voiced Jess Drew / Spider-Woman in *Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse* (2023) and *Beyond the Spider-Verse* (upcoming). Rae provided the voice work for the short film *Hair Love*, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2020.
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 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." 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.
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. Rae worked odd jobs and at one point was struggling to decide between business school and law school, but eventually abandoned both ideas when *Awkward Black Girl* started taking off in 2011.

## References

1. ↑ Issa Rae (in English) (1 September 2023). Retrieved on 1 September 2023.