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 Actress,
teacher, director, singer, writer RHODESSA
JONES is Co-Artistic
Director of the internationally acclaimed performance
company, Cultural Odyssey. Ms. Jones is also the Founder
and Director of the award winning Medea Project: Theater
for Incarcerated Women, a performance workshop designed
to achieve personal and social transformation for incarcerated
women. Her most recent Medea Project production, “My
Life in the Concrete Jungle”, premiered October
2006 at San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theater.
She is Artistic Director of the 2007 San Francisco International
Arts Festival. In June 2006 she directed a public reading
for Eve Ensler’s, “Any One of Us” for
VDAY: Until the Violence Stops at Lincoln Center, which
featured Rosie O’Donnell, Shirley Knight, Phylicia
Rashad, and Rosario Dawson.
Ms. Jones lectures nationally
and internationally on making art in communities. She
has lectured at Yale School of Drama, U.C Davis School
of Law, Stanford University, American University in Washington
D.C., and the Getty Museum. Along with her work in the
San Francisco County Jail and the Medea Project, Ms.
Jones has conducted workshops with incarcerated women
in Turin, Italy, and South Africa for the “Urban
Voices Festival.”
Her awards include the 2005 SF
NOIR Kuumba Award for Excellence in the Arts 2005 and,
in the spring of 2004, an Honorary Doctorate Degree from
California College of the Arts. In November 2003 she
was presented with a "GOLDIE Lifetime Achievement
Award" presented by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
During the winter semester Rhodessa was Visiting-Artist-In
Residence at Stanford University /Institute for Diversity
in the Arts. In May 2003 Ms. Jones was awarded a Non-Profit
Arts Excellence Award by the San Francisco Business Arts
Council. In June Ms. Jones received an Otto Rene Castillo
Award for Political Theater.
Ms. Jones was awarded a
San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Award that
commended her for developing the Medea Project as an
intersection of art, politics, and social rehabilitation.
For more information, please visit www.culturalodyssey.org.
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