Akilah Saidah Kamaria Hughes[2] (born August 31, 1989) is an American writer, comedian, YouTuber, podcaster, and actress. She has been a digital correspondent for MTV, HBO, Fusion TV, and Comedy Central. She began her career on a YouTube channel, "It's Akilah, Obviously!", which has amassed more than 150,000 subscribers. From October 2019 to July 2021, she co-hosted the Crooked Media podcast What a Day, alongside journalist Gideon Resnick.[3]
On December 2, 2013, Hughes uploaded a comedy video, "Meet Your First Black Girlfriend," answering hypothetical questions from a white boyfriend, and it went viral.[9] She was again recognized for releasing the video "On Intersectionality in Feminism and Pizza", that went viral after being uploaded on April 8, 2015.[10]
On June 30, 2016, Hughes created a petition on Change.org titled "Ask Advertisers to Stop Supporting BuzzFeed Video's Idea Theft", which aimed to convince advertisers to stop supporting BuzzFeed Video. In the petition, described by The Washington Post as having gone viral,[11] she argued, "BuzzFeed has been caught repeatedly stealing ideas, jokes, bits, gags, and therefore money from prominent YouTube creators."[11]
In 2017, Hughes sued YouTuber Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) for copyright infringement after he used a portion of her Hillary Clinton election party footage. In August 2020, the judge, ruling Benjamin's video to be fair use criticism, dismissed the case with prejudice and ordered Hughes to pay Benjamin's legal costs in the amount of $38,785.35 for attorneys’ fees and $126.54 for costs, on the grounds that Hughes had filed a frivolous lawsuit and acted with “improper motivation”.[12][13]
In April 2020, Comedy Central's YouTube channel released three sketches starring Hughes and Milana Vayntrub as part of a new digital sketch series called Making Fun With Akilah and Milana.[14]
Television
Hughes began appearing as herself on web series in 2014, with her first appearances coming in two episodes of mental_floss: The List Show. Between 2014 and 2017, she made various other appearances as herself on web series, including Vlogbrothers in 2015 and Project for Awesome 2016. In 2017, she hosted the first season of GK Now, a daily culinary news show for Genius Kitchen (now Food.com) for Scripps Network.[15]
In 2020, Hughes appeared as a panelist on the Syfy television series The Great Debate. That same year, she made her first appearance as an actress on a television series, when she provided the voice of Theresa in an episode of Bob's Burgers titled "Just the Trip".
Writing
In 2015, Hughes was awarded a fellowship from the Sundance Episodic Story Lab, with a half-hour comedy pilot titled Unlikely, co-written with Lyle Friedman.[17]
Hughes began writing her first book in 2015, after a collaboration with Penguin Group for her Tipsy Book Reviews video series on YouTube led the publisher to offer her a book deal.[8] The book, a collection of essays titled Obviously: Stories From My Timeline, was published on September 24, 2019, by Penguin Random House's Razorbill imprint.[18][19] The book was included in PopSugar's "The 26 Best New Books You Need to Read This Fall", where writer Brenda Janowitz described the essays as "as hilarious as they are heart-warming."[20] Writing for the Los Angeles Sentinel, Lapacazo Sandoval calls the book "very insightful and very, very funny".[21]
Beginning in 2019, Hughes became the co-host of a newly launched daily news podcast from Crooked Media titled What a Day, alongside political journalist Gideon Resnick.[3] The podcast's first episode, titled "Baghdadi and Blackouts", was released on October 28, 2019. What a Day won a Webby Award as the People's Voice Winner of "Best News & Politics Podcast" in 2021.[24][25] The 412th episode of What a Day—released on July 30, 2021, and titled "Keeping The DREAM Alive"—was Hughes' final episode as co-host of the podcast.[26]
As part of a newly signed deal in July 2023, iHeartMedia and Ninth Planet Audio announced the production of a podcast to be hosted by Hughes.[27] On September 3, 2024, the podcast titled Rebel Spirit with Akilah Hughes premiered its first episode "A Homecoming". Rebel Spirit sees Hughes return to her hometown of Florence, Kentucky, where she attempts to convince her high school, Boone County High School, to change its confederate general mascot.[28][29][30]
Film
Hughes made her feature film acting debut in 2023's Me, Myself & the Void, starring alongside a cast including Jack DeSena and Kelly Marie Tran, in the film directed by Tim Hautekiet.
Personal life
Hughes was diagnosed with benign liver tumors in 2015, an illness for which she had surgery in July 2016.[8][31] Using the crowdfunding website GoFundMe, she raised nearly $40,000, which covered 60% of the costs related to her surgery.[32]
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