Rhodessa Jones is Co-Artistic Director of the acclaimed San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey. She is an actress, teacher, director, and writer. Jones is also the Director of the award winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women and HIV Circle, which is a performance workshop designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women and women living with HIV. In the spring of 2016 she was Visiting Artist in Residence at University of California, Berkeley, teaching the Black Theater workshop, and she just received the Theatre Practitioner Award, presented by Theater Communications Group. During spring semester 2014, Jones was the Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2013 The Office of Mayor Edwin M. Lee and the San Francisco Art Commission presented the 2013 Mayor’s Art Award to Jones, for her “lifetime of artistic achievement and enduring commitment to the role of the arts in civic life.” In December of 2007 she received a United States Artist Fellowship to support her work, and was honored with an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts in 2004. Jones has been named a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College for the fall or 2017; the following semester, she will be a Rhodes Professor at Cornell University.​