Birthday: February 25, 1976
Birth Place: Los Angeles, California, USA
Birth Name: Rashida Leah Jones
Nickname: Rash or Rashi
Height: 5′ 4″ (1,63 mt)
Rashida Jones was born in Los Angeles, California, to actress Peggy Lipton and musician/record producer Quincy Jones. She is the younger sister of actress and model Kidada Jones, and half-sister to five siblings from their father’s other relationships, including Kenya Jones and Quincy Jones III. Jones’s father is African American with Tikar roots from Cameroon, and a paternal Welsh grandfather. Her mother was Ashkenazi Jewish (a descendant of Jewish emigrants from Russia and Latvia). Jones and her sister were raised in Reform Judaism by their mother; Jones attended Hebrew school, though she left at the age of ten and did not have a Bat Mitzvah.
Jones grew up in Los Angeles’ Bel Air neighborhood. She has said of her parents’ mixed-race marriage: “it was the 1970s and still not that acceptable for them to be together”. In his autobiography, her father recalled how he would often find the six-year-old Jones under the covers after bedtime, reading five books at a time with a flashlight. She has said that she grew up a “straight-up nerd” and “had a computer with floppy disks and a dial-up modem before it was cool”.
Jones displayed musical ability from a young age and can play classical piano. Her mother told Entertainment Tonight that Jones is “also a fabulous singer and songwriter”. Jones attended The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, California, where she made the National Honor Society and was voted “Most Likely To Succeed” by her classmates. Jones was involved with theater at Buckley, with tutelage from acting teacher Tim Hillman. Jones’s parents divorced when she was 14 years old; her sister subsequently remained with their father, while Rashida moved with their mother to Brentwood.
In 1994, Jones garnered attention with an open letter responding to scathing remarks made by rapper Tupac Shakur about her parents’ interracial marriage. They managed to patch up their differences and Shakur eventually went on to be friends with Rashida and her family. Rashida’s sister, Kidada Jones, was dating Tupac at the time of his death.
Rashida Jones attended Harvard University, where she lived in Currier House and Eliot House. She belonged to the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club, Harvard-Radcliffe Opportunes, Black Students Association, and the Signet Society. She was initially interested in becoming a lawyer but changed her mind after becoming disillusioned by the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
She became involved in the performing arts and served as musical director for the Opportunes, an a cappella group, co-composed the score for the 149th annual Hasty Pudding Theatricals performance, and acted in several plays. In her second year at college, Jones performed in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which she said was “healing” because she had been seen by many blacks as not being “black enough”. She studied religion and philosophy and graduated in 1997.
Public image
Philanthropic efforts
Jones has worked to promote Peace First (formerly Peace Games), a nonprofit that teaches children to resolve conflict without violence. She has been a board member since 2004 and holds several annual benefits to raise money for the organization. Jones has participated in Stand Up to Cancer events, EDUN and ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History, and The Art of Elysium’s volunteer program, which runs artistic workshops for hospitalized children. In 2007, she was honorary chair of the annual Housing Works benefit, which fights AIDS and homelessness in New York City. She has helped fundraise for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the EB Medical Research Foundation, and New York’s Lower Eastside Girls Club.
Syria refugee camp visit
In 2016, Jones visited a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. She wrote about the confronting experience for Vanity Fair. She also made a virtual reality movie to document her experiences, which appeared on rescue.org.
Political work
Jones has campaigned in the last four cycles for Democratic Party presidential candidates. She supported Barack Obama during the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In 2008, along with Kristen Bell, she visited college campuses in Missouri to discuss the candidates and to encourage voter registration for the Democratic Party.
In 2012, she campaigned in Iowa along with co-star Adam Scott. Jones previously campaigned for Democratic candidate John Kerry during the 2004 election, speaking at student rallies and a public gallery in Ohio. In the 2016 Democratic primary, she endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election.
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