Jocqui Smollett Biography

Jocqui Smollett earned fame as an infant when he appeared on ABC's TV show 'On Our Own' in 1994. The series also featured his five real-life siblings: Jojo, Jazz, Jussie, Jurnee and Jake, as his on-screen siblings. While he moved away from television to focus on his education and career, he came back for his family’s cooking show 'Smollett Eats' along with his siblings in 2016. He recently resurfaced to support his brother Jussie following the controversy surrounding an alleged hate crime assault on him in early 2019. Jussie had claimed that he received threatening letters before being allegedly physically assaulted by two people, who tried to strangle him with a rope. However, a police investigations report later said that the whole incident was staged by Jussie, who was dissatisfied with his payment on 'Empire'. Jocqui expressed his solidarity with his brother by sharing a Malcolm X quote on his Instagram, claiming that the "irresponsible media" had made his victim brother look like a criminal. Jussie was later arrested, even though the charges were abruptly dropped later. The FBI is currently investigating why the charges were dropped so suddenly.

Jocqui Smollett founded 'Next Level: Advancement to Cultural Understanding' in September 2008 when he was still a school student. He remained the group’s president until June 2010. In March 2010, the youngster founded 'Raising The Bar', an initiative that strived to help improve math and science performances among the youth living in poor communities in the United States. In 2012, while attending the ‘University of California’, Santa Cruz, he served as the field manager of the student union assembly for three months. He served as the assistant financial operating officer at the ‘NYLA International Film Festival in the Greater Los Angeles Area’ from June to September 2012. In this role, he managed box office and ticket sale revenue of over $1,000 and helped in recovering the festival’s budget. For just over a year in 2012-13, he was a co-chair at the African/Black Student Alliance, and also served as a co-chair at the 2014 African Black Coalition Conference.

For two months in mid-2013, Jocqui worked as a business consulting intern at ‘Gold Millennium Group Consulting’ in Beijing City, China. He then became a research assistant at the UC Santa Cruz Economics Department from September 2013 to March 2014. Since May 2014, he spent one year at ‘Plantronics’ as a global service operations Intern. After completing his education, he joined SurveyMonkey as a sales operations specialist in Palo Alto, California, in June 2015. In March 2016, he took responsibilities as a data analyst at SurveyMonkey Audience and Wufoo in San Mateo. After one and a half years, he became a senior data analyst in the sales and solutions department at SurveyMonkey’s San Francisco Bay Area office. He left SurveyMonkey after working there for three years and four months and became the manager of sales strategy and analytics at ‘Snowflake Computing’ in San Mateo in November 2018.

Jocqui Smollett was born on August 2, 1994 in Santa Rosa, California, United States, to actors Janet (née Harris) and Joel Smollett. His father was a Jewish American, who was born into a family that immigrated from Russia and Poland, while his mother is of African-American heritage. His father, who died in January 2015, had left the family when Jocqui was really young. His parents have six children, and his three brothers are called, Jojo, Jussie and Jake, while his two sisters’ names are Jazz and Jurnee. All his siblings have worked in the entertainment industry either as actors or singers.

Jocqui attended Calabasas High School from 2007 to 2011. He then joined the University of California, Santa Cruz, from where he earned a dual bachelor's degree in global economics and pure mathematics in 2015. He focused on Latin America for his Global Economics studies, spending a quarter of a year at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain to learn about international economics. His academic achievements earned him a ‘Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship’ in 2014. He can speak fluently in English and Spanish.