10 Things You Didn’t Know About Insecure’s Issa Rae

Dorm Diaries

Before she delivered The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl to us, one of Issa Rae’s first series was called Dorm Diaries. It was about Black folks on Stanford’s campus.  It exposed her to the capabilities of delivering content to the masses. Per her interview with Filmmaker Magazine: 

One of Rae’s early Web productions was Dorm Diaries, a series that depicted black student life at Stanford. Facebook and YouTube were starting to blow up, and then Facebook came out with the ability to post media to your profile page. Rae immediately saw the opportunity this created. “I realized that I could write and create a series starring my friends, and that they could share it without any effort. I thought maybe a Web series like that could go viral.” The show didn’t go viral, but it did spread beyond her Stanford friends’ pages. “The series was a mockumentary about what it was like to be black at Stanford, but people at Georgetown, Duke, Howard — all these other schools — were also totally into it. They started seeing it and were like, ‘Oh, this is so cool, this is humor that’s specific to my experience too,’ and so they started sharing it among their own friends.”