Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (Rae)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 12, 1985
• Raised—Potomac, Maryland, and Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University
• Awards—Shorty Award, Best Web Show
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


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. She is also the author of a 2015 collection of personal essays, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.

Personal life
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."[2] 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 between business school and law school, but abandoned both ideas when Awkward Black Girl started taking off.

Early career
Rae created Awkward Black Girl out of the belief Hollywood stereotypes of African-American women were limiting: "I felt like my voice was missing, and the voices of other people that I really respect and admire and wanna see in the mainstream are missing." Her other show—Ratchet Piece Theater, The "F" Word, Roomieloverfriends, and The Choir—also focus on African-American experiences that are often not portrayed in the mainstream media.

In 2012, Rae made it to the Forbes "30 Under 30" Entertainment list, and Awkward Black Girl won the Shorty Award for Best Web Show. In 2013, she began working on a pilot for the show I Hate LA Dudes. She has also teamed up with Larry Wilmore to co-write Non-Prophet, an HBO comedy series about the awkward experiences of a contemporary African-American woman, in which she will be starring. Rae is currently signed with UTA and 3 Arts Entertainment. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/22/2015.)