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 Founder and 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. Beginning in January of 2009 Rhodessa will embark on Cultural Odyssey’s 30th Anniversary tour performing her newest performance piece, The Love Project, written in collaboration with noted writer Pearl Cleage and Zaron Burnett, at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in Tampa, Florida, 7 Stages in Atlanta and many other locations. In November 2008, for the first time in South African history, Rhodessa Jones directed a full-length theater production with female inmates inside the Johannesburg Correctional Services (popularly known as “Sun City prison”). In June 2006 she directed a public reading for Eve Ensler’s, VDAY: Until the Violence Stops Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Ms. Jones was honored with an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts in 2004. Rhodessa has received many awards for her work including a GOLDIE Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2003, an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater in 2002, and a San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Award commending her for developing the Medea Project as “an intersection of art, politics and social rehabilitation.” In June 2001, her film collaboration We Just Telling Stories, a film profiling Ms. Jones and her work with the Medea Project in the San Francisco County jails, won Best Documentary at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. This award paralleled the 2001 release of a book on Ms. Jones’ work entitled Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and the Theater for Incarcerated Women by Rena Fraden, Ph.D. with a forward by Professor Angela Davis.