Rhodessa Jones
Coalition Member
Rhodessa Jones is an artist and Founder/Director of the award-winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women/HIV Circle, a workshop designed for personal and social transformation that also provides women with unique tools to explore their experiences as both agents and objects of crime. Using Jones’ methodologies and Praxis of Restorative Justice, she has worked with many prison systems and programs worldwide. For example, as a U.S. Arts Envoy for the U.S. State Department, she worked over seven years with women inmates in Johannesburg Correctional Services in South Africa.
Jones became a pioneer when she collaborated with the San Francisco Sheriff to release women in order to perform at public theaters. This was the first time that the public could hear directly from incarcerated women in their own words, in-person. It also reunited them with their families, as a redressive mechanism that evolved into a community re-entry collective.
Rhodessa Jones is also the Co-Artistic Director of the critically-acclaimed arts company Cultural Odyssey, which spearheaded Arts As Social Activism. She is also a playwright and the subject of many books, films, and academic publications. She has been honored with the Frank H.T. Rhodes Chair at Cornell University 2018-2021; Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College; Sui Generis Foundation Achievement Award; the San Francisco Mayoral Art Award by Mayor Edwin Lee; Danny Glover and Harlem Alliance of Families for Justice Honor; and, an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts.
Most recently, Jones acted in Pixar’s double Oscar-winning SOUL with Jamie Foxx and Angela Bassett, which is Disney’s first animated feature film about a Black man. The script reflects Black cultural heritage through Jones’ mentee, co-director/writer Kemp Powers.