Rashida Jones (born February 25, 1976, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American actress, writer, and producer known for her roles in such TV shows as Parks and Recreation, Boston Public, and The Office. She is the daughter of legendary songwriter and Grammy Award-winning producer Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton.

Early years and family

Rashida Jones grew up in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her father was Black, and her mother was white and Jewish, and Jones recalled her dad keeping “jazz hours,” often composing music late into the night somewhere in the house. Both of her parents were celebrities—Quincy Jones, who died in November 2024, worked with such stars as Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, and Miles Davis, and Peggy Lipton, who died in May 2019, starred in the police drama The Mod Squad, which aired in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before a brief comeback in the early ’90s on the cult TV show Twin Peaks.

Jones has recalled that her celebrity upbringing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “It changed the dynamic of our household. People think [fame is] this wonderful, magical heal-all, and it’s actually the opposite. It can be a poison. It can be intoxicating and destructive,” she told National Public Radio (NPR) in 2021. In Bel Air, Jones was friends with many celebrities’ children including Sidney Poitier’s kids and Sinatra’s grandchildren; Poitier was also her godfather. Her parents separated when she was about 10 years old and divorced three years later; she stayed with her mother after the separation.

Jones didn’t intend to follow her parents into show business. Instead she went to Harvard University, focusing on philosophy and religion. She had planned to study law but was put off by the O.J. Simpson trial and changed her mind. One of her Harvard classmates was Michael Schur, who would create Parks and Recreation. They met while doing a freshman play titled Love, Sex, and the I.R.S., which Jones compared to an episode of the TV show Three’s Company (1976–84).

Acting career

After graduating from Harvard in 1997, Jones began acting in B-movies; when she was 25, she told the New York Post, “I don’t have the power to turn down lots of scripts,” adding that she “only felt the negative repercussions” of nepotism. She later recalled that being biracial made it challenging to get parts early on; producers weren’t sure how to cast her. In 1997 Jones appeared in the miniseries The Last Don, based on the book by Mario Puzo, and in 2000 she had a role in the TV movie If These Walls Could Talk 2. One of her first steady TV roles was in the Fox drama Boston Public, in which she played Louisa Fenn, the assistant to the school principal, from 2000 to 2002.

In 2006 Jones landed the role of Karen Filippelli in season three of the hit NBC sitcom The Office, playing the love interest of Jim Halpert, who was portrayed by one of the show’s stars, John Krasinski. She told People magazine in 2024 that she felt like she “had won a radio contest or something, cause I had watched and loved that show for two seasons, and all of a sudden I’m, like, in the room with the people.” Another career milestone came in 2009 when Jones was cast as Ann Perkins in NBC’s Parks and Recreation. The show became a huge streaming hit, but Jones recalled that it was nearly canceled several times and that the cast always “felt like we were on the bubble.” Jones appeared in the 2010 film The Social Network and played the title role in the TBS comedy series Angie Tribeca (2016–18).

In 2020 Jones played Joya Barris in Netflix’s #blackAF. “To be able to play roles where I get to be Black and unapologetically Black, like I am in #blackAF, has been such a relief for me because it’s a whole side of myself that I haven’t really gotten to play very often,” she told NPR. That same year she starred opposite Bill Murray in the movie On the Rocks. In 2023 she had a role in the Apple TV+ dystopian series Silo and the next year starred in another Apple TV+ series, Sunny, in which her character is paired with a domestic robot in Japan after learning that her husband and son have disappeared after a plane crash.

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Producing and writing work

Along with her writing partner Will McCormack, Jones has a production company called Le Train Train, which has produced such shows as Claws and Kevin Can F**k Himself. They wrote the 2012 film Celeste and Jesse Forever, which starred Jones alongside Andy Samberg. Jones and McCormack also worked on the screenplay for the 2019 film Toy Story 4 but wound up leaving the Pixar project. “We parted ways because of creative and, more importantly, philosophical differences,” they told The New York Times in 2017. “There is so much talent at Pixar, and we remain enormous fans of their films. However, it is also a culture where women and people of color do not have an equal creative voice.” They were credited for the film’s writing.

Jones cowrote the 2016 episode “Nosedive” from the third season of the acclaimed TV series Black Mirror. Along with Alan Hicks she wrote and directed the 2018 documentary Quincy based on her father’s life; it won the best music film award at the 2019 Grammy Awards.

Personal life

Rashida Jones has an older sister, Kidada Jones, as well as five half-siblings on her father’s side, including music composer and producer Quincy Jones III. Rashida Jones was previously engaged to music producer Mark Ronson. In 2018 Jones and her partner, Ezra Koenig of the band Vampire Weekend, had a son named Isaiah Jones Koenig.