Rhodessa Jones (2017-23) is Co-Artistic Director of the San Francisco acclaimed performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, singer, and writer. 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 and women living with HIV.

Thanks to Jones, art students from all cultures can flock to universities and learn non-European methods to develop their authentic voices, to give voice to the voiceless, and transform society in the process. Jones always challenged her students to think critically about the vital role of the arts and humanities in community action.

As a recipient of the U.S. Artist Fellowship, Jones expanded her work in corrections and for educational institutions internationally. She conducted the Medea Project in South African prisons, working with incarcerated women and trained correctional personnel and local artists. In 2012, the U.S. Department of State Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau named her as Arts Envoy for the U.S. Embassy.

In 2015, Jones received the Theatre Practitioner Award presented by Theater Communications Group. The award recognizes “a living individual whose work in the American theatre has evidenced exemplary achievement over time and who has contributed significantly to the development of the larger field.”

In 2016, she received a Theatre Bay Legacy Award presented to individuals that have made “extraordinary contributions to the Bay Area theatre community.” And in 2017, Jones was named a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth University. Other residencies in the United States include Brown University and Scripps College Humanities Institute. Jones is a recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts, SF Bay Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Award, SF Foundation Community Leadership Award, Non-Profit Arts Excellence Award by the SF Business Arts Council, and an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater.

Most recently, Jones was an Actress/Voice Talent for the character “Lulu” in Disney’s (Pixar) SOUL, a feature length animated film that won two Golden Globe Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score.