Jessica Vanessa - Comedians, Career and Family

As a child, Jessica Vanessa DeLeon was shy and did not particularly interact with other children. She would not even dance before anybody. However, it all changed when she started hanging out with a different group of children who were outgoing and extroverted. She was attending middle school during this period. By the time she became a high-school student, she was already a self-described party girl.

She completed her education and started working at a kindergarten school as a part-time teacher. In an interview with ‘Cosmopolitan,’ she had stated that she loved the job and the opportunity to work with children. However, it wasn’t a financially lucrative profession.

After setting up her Vine account, she posted her first six-second-long video, titled ‘What a Good Puppy’ on May 4, 2013. She had about 20 followers at the beginning but the number of her subscribers grew after she entered a comedy contest hosted by popular Viner Eric Dunn. Her fan base expanded to two thousand followers. Initially, all her content was comedic in nature. In fact, her first twerking video was a comedy skit as well. It was only after she saw the positive responses to that video and realised the potential that she began to upload more and more twerking videos. Soon enough, she earned her membership to the “million followers” club on Vine.

At the height of her popularity, she had 2.8 million followers on Vine. After it shut down, DeLeon chose Instagram as her primary social media platform, where she has accumulated over a million followers to date. She has a significant presence on other social media sites as well, with 248 thousand Facebook followers and 142 thousand Twitter followers. She also has more than 120 thousand YouTube subscribers.

Most of her earnings on Vine and Instagram comes from the brands and products she promotes in her videos. She has promoted Airheads candy, multiple gaming apps, and fitness gears, to name a few.

Despite gaining popularity and mainstream attention for her twerking videos, she has continued making comedy skits. She starred as a character named Eva in her debut film ‘Boy Bye’, which was released in 2016. DeLeon subsequently worked in the thriller ‘Only for One Night’, the web series ‘Inside Kim Kardashian's Brain’, and the thriller ‘Til Death Do Us Part’. In 2018, she starred in the television miniseries ‘The Aftermath’ and the short film ‘The Spirit Collector’. Some of her upcoming projects are the action-drama ‘Street Dreams - Los Angeles’ and the romantic-comedy ‘Perfectly Single’.

While she has accumulated millions of fans worldwide due to her natural ability to twerk, DeLeon has attracted a significant amount of criticism as well. As she has stated in an interview, people do have a preconceived notion about twerking. Some even relate it to prostitution. In the past, the negative comments on social media brought about two separate mental breakdowns. She even thought of giving up twerking altogether and quit social media. In the end, she did not delete her social media accounts and continued to pursue her dreams.

Jessica Vanessa DeLeon was born on April 13, 1992 in Orlando, Florida, the US to Puerto Rican parents. She has the full support of her family in her professional pursuits. It is her brother, Joshua, who shoots most of her videos. Her father, Rafael DeLeon, while initially sceptical about twerking, is today proud of his daughter’s achievements.

She has been dating fellow Viner and collaborator Chris Jay. They regularly feature in each other’s content.