Cord Jefferson
Mixed race: father white, mother black
transitioned to working as writer for TV. He wrote for the Comedy Central late-night series The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (2015–2016), the Netflix comedy series Master of None (2017), and the NBC sitcom The Good Place (2017–2019)
For his work on the HBO limited series Watchmen (2019), he received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series or Movie.
Jefferson made his feature directorial debut with the satire American Fiction (2023), for which he received Best Picture nomination and won Best Adapted Screenplay.
Cord Jefferson was born in Tucson, Arizona, to a white mother and black father.
After living outside the US for several years until Jefferson was about five, the family returned to Tucson. His maternal grandfather was shocked by his daughter’s choice to marry a black man, and he shut her and his grandson out of his life.
Jefferson’s parents divorced when he was 14, after his first year of high school.
Jefferson graduated from Canyon del Oro High School north of Tucson.
He attended the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where his father had gone to law school.
After college, Jefferson lived in LA and in Brooklyn, NY. He also went to NYU for business school.
Jefferson’s mother died in 2016 of cancer. When his father needed kidney transplant in July 2008, Jefferson donated one of his, traveling to Saudi Arabia where his father lives.
He wrote a personal essay on the experience, noting that he was treated for atrial fibrillation and that after surgery he quit smoking.
As a writer, Jefferson got his start in journalism. Among his first jobs were writing for both Stereohyped and MollyGood.
He spent two years as an editor at Gawker, from 2012 to 2014. He also wrote for publications including USA Today, Huffington Post, The Root, and The New York Times Magazine.
Jefferson started his TV career in 2014 as a staff writer for the Starz comedy-drama series Survivor’s Remorse before writing for the comedy Central late night series The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore from 2015 to 2016.
Jefferson then became a story editor and consulting producer for Aziz Ansari’s Netflix comedy series “Master of None” (2017), for which he received Writers Guild of America Award nominations, and the Mike Schur-created NBC sitcom The Good Place (2017–2019).
For his work on the HBO limited series Watchmen (2019), he received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series or Movie for the episode, “This Extraordinary Being.” In the middle of 2020, Jefferson worked on a TV series about his time writing for Gawker. He is developing the show for Apple TV+. Later in that year, he signed an overall deal with Warner TV.
In 2021, Jefferson served as a writer and supervising producer for the HBO limited series “Station Eleven.”
He made his feature directorial debut with the satire American Fiction (2023), which won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Fest and was nominated for 5 Oscars, winning Best Adapted Screenplay.
On April 2, 2026, Netflix announced a straight-to-series order for The Corrections, based on Jonathan Franzen’s bestselling 2001 novel. Jefferson will direct all episodes of the limited series, with Meryl Streep in the lead role.
