Issa Rae is an American actress and writer. She is the creator of the YouTube workplace-comedy series Awkward Black Girl as well as Ratchet Piece Theater, The "F" Word, and The Choir. Since the premiere of Awkward Black Girl in 2011, Rae’s shows have garnered over 20 million views and over 180,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Biography

She was born on January 12, 1985 to an African American mother and Senegalese father.

As a child, Rae lived 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 she was in sixth grade, her family moved to Los Angeles and enrolled her in a predominantly black middle school where she was “berated for ‘acting white'" and initially found it difficult to "fit into this ‘blackness’ I was supposed to be."

Rae attended Stanford University and graduated in 2007. As a college student, she made music videos, wrote and directed plays, and created a mock reality series called Dorm Diaries for fun. It was at Stanford that she met Tracy Oliver, who helped produce Awkward Black Girl and starred on the show as Nina. The two started taking classes together at the New York Film Academy.

After graduation, Rae worked odd jobs and at one point was struggling to decide between business school and law school, but abandoned both ideas when Awkward Black Girl started taking off.