About

Rhodessa Jones is Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco acclaimed performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, singer, and writer. Ms. Jones is also the Director of the award winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, which is a performance workshop that is designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women.

Rhodessa has just returned from New York City where she directed BLESSING THE BOATS: THE REMIX, Sekou Sundiata’s acclaimed solo theater work. The Office of Mayor Edwin M. Lee and the San Francisco Art Commission presented the 2013 Mayor’s Art Award to Rhodessa Jones, for her ”lifetime of artistic achievement and enduring commitment to the role of the arts in civic life.” In June 2012 the U.S. Department of State, Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau selected Rhodessa as an “ARTS ENVOY”! As one of San Francisco’s most revered artists, she received grant support to journey to South Africa to continue her work inside the Naturena Women’s Prison in Johannesburg, South Africa. In December of 2007, Ms. Jones received a United States Artist Fellowship to support her work. In 2004 she was honored with an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts. Rhodessa’s work has been published in Colored Contradictions An Anthology of Contemporary African – American Plays (“Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women”), (Penguin Group); Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts From The Twentieth Century (Theater Communications Group). Her work with incarcerated women is the subject a book by Rena Fraden titled Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women, (University of North Carolina Press).