Jordan Peele was born in New York City on February 21, 1979, and developed a career as a performer, writer, director and producer. He attended Sarah Lawrence College but left after two years to pursue comedy, first forming a duo with classmate Rebecca Drysdale. He met Keegan-Michael Key at Chicago’s Second City and joined MADtv in 2003, spending five seasons on the show before the pair created Key & Peele, the Comedy Central sketch series that made them household names. His television work also included a recurring role in Fargo.
The Peabody Awards’ account explicitly describes both men as biracial, with Black fathers and white mothers. It discusses their range of characters and their treatment of racial identity in comedy. One recurring sketch featured Peele as Barack Obama and Key as Luther, an imagined interpreter of the president’s anger.
In a 2018 interview with TIME, Peele spoke about growing up Black in America and described studying puppetry, acting and other subjects at Sarah Lawrence College. He connected those interests to the collaborative work of directing.
The Television Academy records Peele as an executive producer on Key & Peele when the program won outstanding variety sketch series in 2016. His writing also received nominations.
His feature directing debut, Get Out, was released in 2017. At the 2018 Academy Awards, Peele won original screenplay. He was the first African American writer to win that category, a distinction separate from earlier Black winners for adapted screenplays. The film’s Best Picture nomination credited producers Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, Edward H. Hamm Jr. and Peele.
His subsequent features included Us in 2019 and Nope in 2022. He also co-wrote, produced and voiced a role in Wendell & Wild, the 2022 stop-motion film directed by Henry Selick. Monkeypaw Productions, which he founded on January 31, 2012, forms another part of his work across film and television.
