Overview
Maya Indea Jama ( ; born 14 August 1994) is a British television presenter and radio DJ. She co-presented BBC One's Peter Crouch: Save Our Summer alongside Peter Crouch and Alex Horne and was the presenter of the BBC Three competition Glow Up: Britain's Next Make-Up Star for the third and fourth series and ITV2’s dating series Love Island.
Jama co-presented Trending Live! on 4Music from 2015 until 2017, Cannonball on ITV in 2017, the MTV show True Love or True Lies in 2018, and the first series of The Circle with Alice Levine on Channel 4. In radio, Jama hosted #DriveWithMaya on Rinse FM from 2014 to 2017, and co-presented Radio 1's Greatest Hits and presented her eponymous show, Maya Jama on BBC Radio 1 from 2018 to 2020. In 2023, Jama took over as the host of the popular ITV2 dating reality series, Love Island.
Early life
Jama was born and raised in Bristol, where she attended Cotham School. She is of Somali descent on her father's side and Swedish descent on her mother's side. Her mother, Sadie, was 19 when she gave birth to Jama, and she named her after the US author and poet Maya Angelou. She also has a brother.
Jama's father was in prison for most of her childhood, for violence-related crimes such as pub brawls and fights. Aged 12, she decided to stop visiting her father in prison and for a decade blocked him from her thoughts. She said in a 2017 interview with The Guardian that she did not really notice it being a problem: "It was normal for me. My dad's side of my family was super-supportive and they did everything in their power to make me and my brother not feel like we were missing out on anything". While working on the documentary When Dads Kill in 2017, which dealt with young people's experiences similar to her own childhood, she relented and examined her relationship with her own father, by then released from prison, meeting with him in an attempt to elicit answers directly from him; "nothing he said, and nothing his family told her, gave her any real insights" into why he had ended up in prison.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).