Issa Rae

Issa Rae (born January 12, 1985, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American writer, actress, and producer best known for her Web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011–13) and her HBO television series Insecure (2016–21), both of which explore the experience of being a young Black woman in America.

Early life

Jo-Issa Rae Diop is one of five children of mother Delyna Diop, a teacher from Louisiana, and father Abdoulaye Diop, a pediatrician from Senegal. Between 1988 and 1990, the family lived in Abdoulaye Diop’s hometown of Dakar but eventually settled in the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Abdoulaye Diop founded a pediatric clinic in nearby Inglewood, and Jo-Issa Rae Diop was enrolled in King/Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science in South Los Angeles. The school comprised mostly Black and Latino students, and she participated in a number of the drama department’s productions focusing on race and class, including the 1939 play On Strivers’ Row.

Dorm Diaries and The ‘F’ Word

After high school, Diop attended Stanford University, where she majored in African and African American studies. As an undergrad, she produced a successful stage adaptation of School Daze, Spike Lee’s musical comedy about life at a historically Black college. During her senior year, Diop created a mockumentary Web series called Dorm Diaries that explores the lives of Black college students, and it became popular on a number of college campuses. The New York Times noted that while working on the project, Diop “learned that she had a knack for portraying everyday black life—not made special by its otherness or defined in contrast to whiteness, but treated as a subject worthy of exploration all of its own.” After graduating in 2007, Diop received a fellowship at the Public Theater in New York, and she continued making Web series, including Fly Guys Present “The ‘F’ Word” (2009), which follows a group of aspiring rappers. In 2008 she shortened her name to Issa Rae.

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

In 2011 Rae released the first episode of her next Web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. The show follows the life of the titular awkward Black girl, played by Rae. “What influenced me to start Awkward Black Girl in the first place was just this negative representation of regular Black girls on television,” Rae told an audience in 2017 at the Paley Center for Media in New York. “I was frustrated by the lack of representation I was seeing,” she said. The Web series was immensely successful, amassing millions of views and winning a Shorty Award in 2012 for best Web series. The second season was released on I am OTHER, Pharrell Williams’s YouTube channel.

I Hate L.A. Dudes, Color Creative, and memoir

On the basis of the success of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Rae was approached to develop a pilot in 2013 with Shonda Rhimes for the television network ABC. She came up with a comedy titled I Hate L.A. Dudes, about a woman trying to date in self-obsessed Hollywood. To make the show appealing to a broad audience, Rae later told The New York Times, “I compromised my vision, and it didn’t end up the show that I wanted. It wasn’t funny anymore.’’ ABC ultimately passed on the pilot. In 2014 she cofounded Color Creative, a management company with the goal of helping women and minority writers produce and showcase their Web series. The following year Rae published her memoir, also titled The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, which became a New York Times bestseller.

Insecure and marriage

In 2014 Rae was hired by HBO to develop a TV series, and the result was Insecure, which premiered in 2016. Starring Rae, the show follows the life of Rae’s self-named character and her best friend, Molly, as they navigate their professional and love lives as Black women in Los Angeles. Rae became the second Black woman—after Wanda Sykes and her 2003 sitcom Wanda at Large—to create and star in her own prime-time series, and the first Black woman to do so on premium cable. The series received positive reviews, with critics praising its honesty and its portrayal of Black female friendship. During the series’ last season, in 2021, critic Doreen St. Félix of The New Yorker wrote, “Across its five seasons, ‘Insecure,’ an ever-changing and imperfect exploration of modern Black adulthood, has always been at its most acute when it focuses on [the] relationship [between Issa and Molly.]” Throughout Insecure’s run, the show was nominated for a number of awards, including an Emmy for outstanding comedy series in 2020, and Rae was nominated for a Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a comedy series in 2017, 2018, and 2022. After the series wrapped in 2021, Rae married her longtime boyfriend, Louis Diame, a Senegalese businessman.

Acting roles

In between writing, executive producing, and starring in Insecure, Rae also acted in several feature films, television shows, and music videos. She portrayed Rachel in an all-Black version of the sitcom Friends in the music video for Jay-Z’s “Moonlight” (2017) and appeared in Drake’s “Nice for What” (2018). Movies include The Hate U Give (2018), a drama based on the best-selling young adult novel by Angie Thomas; Little (2019), a comedy in which Rae played an assistant to an unreasonable boss (played by Regina Hall); The Photograph (2020), a romance also starring LaKeith Stanfield; and The Lovebirds (2020), an action-comedy wherein she and actor Kumail Nanjiani played a couple caught in a murder mystery. She executive produced the last two films. Rae also voiced a character in Hair Love (2019), an Academy Award-winning (2020) animated short film about a Black dad learning to do his daughter’s hair, and in the animated feature Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). In addition, Rae appeared in B.J. Novak’s comedy Vengeance (2022) and in Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster Barbie (2023).

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

A Black Lady Sketch Show and Rap Sh!t

Rae also served as an executive producer on HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show (2019–23). Her follow-up to Insecure was the television series Rap Sh!t, which premiered in 2022. It centers on a pair of female rappers as they try to make it in Miami. In addition to creating the series, Rae serves as an executive producer and a writer. The show was renewed for a second season, but its premiere was delayed because of the 2023 strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.