Issa Rae

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Issa Rae

American actress, writer, and producer

Also known as: Jo-Issa Rae Diop

Written by Frannie Comstock

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jun 25, 2025 • Article History

Quick Facts

Byname of:: Jo-Issa Rae Diop

Born:: January 12, 1985, Los Angeles, California, U.S. (age 40)

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News •

Issa Rae’s ColorCreative Launches Third Year of Its Find Your People Program • June 20, 2025, 9:48 AM ET (The Hollywood Reporter)

Issa Rae’s ColorCreative Strikes Strategic Partnership With HarbourView Equity Partners (Exclusive) • June 17, 2025, 5:19 AM ET (The Hollywood Reporter)

Issa Rae to Star in Comedic Thriller ‘Good People, Bad Things’ About Mysterious Parking Garage • May 31, 2025, 5:56 AM ET (The Hollywood Reporter)

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).

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.

Frannie Comstock The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Hattie McDaniel

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Hattie McDaniel

American actress and singer

Written by J.E. Luebering

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: May 30, 2025 • Article History

Quick Facts

Born:: June 10, 1893 or 1895, Wichita, Kansas, U.S.

Died:: October 26, 1952, Woodland Hills, California

Awards And Honors:: Academy Award (1940); Academy Award (1940): Actress in a Supporting Role

Married To:: Howard Hickman (1911–1915 [his death]); George Langford (1922–1922 [his death]); James Lloyd Crawford (1941–1945); Larry C. Williams (1949–1950)

Movies/Tv Shows (Acted In):: "Star for a Night" (1936); "Over the Goal" (1937); "Sky Racket" (1937); "The Shining Hour" (1938); "Murder by Television" (1935); "High Tension" (1936); "Saratoga" (1937); "The Mad Miss Manton" (1938); "Janie" (1944); "The Male Animal" (1942); "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943); "Reunion" (1936); "Show Boat" (1936); "The Great Lie" (1941); "Affectionately Yours" (1941); "Racing Lady" (1937); "Zenobia" (1939); "Johnny Come Lately" (1943); "Three Is a Family" (1944); "The Shopworn Angel" (1938); "Song of the South" (1946); "Gone with the Wind" (1939); "Can This Be Dixie?" (1936); "The Bride Walks Out" (1936); "Beulah" (1952); "The Flame" (1947); "Everybody's Baby" (1939); "In This Our Life" (1942); "Alice Adams" (1935); "They Died with Their Boots On" (1941); "Hi, Beautiful" (1944); "Janie Gets Married" (1946); "Battle of Broadway" (1938); "The Big Wheel" (1949); "George Washington Slept Here" (1942); "Never Say Goodbye" (1946); "The Crime Nobody Saw" (1937); "Valiant Is the Word for Carrie" (1936); "Since You Went Away" (1944); "Judge Priest" (1934); "Mississippi Moods" (1937); "Maryland" (1940); "Margie" (1946); "Family Honeymoon" (1948); "45 Fathers" (1937); "The First Baby" (1936); "The Little Colonel" (1935); "Music Is Magic" (1935); "Mickey" (1948); "True Confession" (1937); "Gentle Julia" (1936); "Lost in the Stratosphere" (1934)

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Hattie McDaniel (born June 10, 1893 or 1895, Wichita, Kansas, U.S.—died October 26, 1952, Woodland Hills, California) was an American actress and singer who was the first African American to win an Academy Award. She received the honor for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Early life and career

McDaniel was born in Wichita, Kansas, to formerly enslaved parents, and she was raised in Colorado (in Fort Collins and Denver), where she early exhibited her musical and dramatic talent. She left school in 1910 to become a performer in several traveling minstrel groups, and she later became one of the first Black women to be broadcast over American radio.

With the onset of the Great Depression, however, little work was to be found for minstrel or vaudeville players, and to support herself McDaniel went to work as a bathroom attendant at Sam Pick’s club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Although the club as a rule hired only white performers, some of its patrons became aware of McDaniel’s vocal talents and encouraged the owner to make an exception. McDaniel performed at the club for more than a year until she left for Los Angeles, where her brother found her a small role on a local radio show, The Optimistic Do-Nuts. Known as Hi-Hat Hattie, she became the show’s main attraction.

Empty movie theater and blank screen (theatre, motion pictures, cinema).

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Hollywood debut and Oscar win

Two years after McDaniel’s film debut in 1932, she landed her first major part, as Aunt Dilsey, in John Ford’s Judge Priest (1934). The movie gave her the opportunity to sing a duet with humorist Will Rogers. She gained wider notice with The Little Colonel (1935), starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore, in which she was Mom Beck, a genial cook for a family in post-Civil War Kentucky. The role, and her decision to play it, drew criticism from civil rights leaders and others who were campaigning against caricatured, racist representations of Black people in Hollywood films.

“I can be a maid for $7 a week,” McDaniel reportedly said in response to such criticism, “or I can play a maid for $700 a week.” During the 1930s she played the role of maid or cook in nearly 40 films, including Alice Adams (1935), in which her comic characterization of a grumbling, far-from-submissive maid made the dinner party scene one of the best remembered from the film.

McDaniel is today most often associated with the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, a Civil War epic starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable that remained massively popular for three decades. McDaniel played Mammy, one of several enslaved people on the O’Hara plantation. She won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for that role, becoming the first Black person to be nominated for, and to win, an Academy Award.

Ongoing controversy, The Beluah Show, and death

During World War II, McDaniel continued acting in Hollywood films, and she organized entertainment for Black troops. Her conflict with civil rights leaders and others seeking change in Hollywood—particularly Walter White, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—also continued. She answered her critics in the Hollywood Reporter in 1947 by noting the progress the film industry had made in hiring Black actors and workers during her career and by rejecting the claim that Hollywood always typecast Black people. “I have never apologized for the roles I play,” she wrote, adding, “I believe my critics think the public more naïve than it actually is.”

In 1947 McDaniel became the first African American to star in a weekly radio program aimed at a general audience when she agreed to play the role of a maid on The Beulah Show. In 1951, while filming the first six segments of a television version of the popular show, she had a heart attack. She recovered sufficiently to record a number of radio shows in 1952, but she died of breast cancer soon afterward.

When was Hattie McDaniel born?

In Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, a biography published in 2005, the scholar Jill Watts states that McDaniel was born on June 10, 1893, citing 1895 census records held by the Kansas Historical Society that list a Hattie McDaniel who was born in Wichita and is identified as two years old. “Hattie McDaniel later gave conflicting birth dates,” Watts acknowledges in a footnote. A descendant of McDaniel’s extended family, interviewed in 2022 by the Fort Collins Coloradoan, also says she was born in 1893. At the time of her death in 1952, however, McDaniel was widely reported as being 57 years old; her gravestone at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles also shows 1895 as her year of birth. A 1935 interview with The Call newspaper of Kansas City, Missouri, shows how McDaniel herself navigated the question of when she was born: “Although [her] parents are natives of the deep south, Hattie was born in Wichita, Kas., about 36 years ago,” the interviewer explained. “Like most women, she’s skittish about giving her exact age.”

J.E. Luebering The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica