Maya Jama was born on August 14th, 1994, in Bristol. She is a well-known half-Swedish and Somalian DJ, TV presenter, and radio host. Jama grew up in the city of Bristol for most of her life, until she began to start building her career in London at the age of 16, where she would take opportunities anywhere Maya could to pursue her broadcasting career and to get her foot in the door of the presenting world as well. She started off by creating her own YouTube channel and landed her first presenting job at JumpOff TV. While building her way up, she then moved on to host MTV’s The Wrap-Up, following on to MTV News.
In a Vogue Youtube video, Maya Jama rates her Instagram photos from the very start of her career. In a segment of this video, Maya shares that “I was definitely a performance child.” and explains how she would put on performances in her childhood living room for all of her family members to watch and that she would make fake tickets for her performances. Maya Jama then carried on her career at Rinse FM from 2014–2017.
During the time she worked at Rinse, she had different guests on when she was on air from 4 to 7 p.m. on weekdays. One of the guests she had on her show was the now-successful British rapper who goes by the name of Stormzy. They both became good friends on the show and eventually started dating. They dated for 4 years until they split in August 2019. It’s been recently reported that they are now back together after being seen together multiple times from mid-2023 to the present.
The rise of her career has given her so many more big opportunities, from being a panellist on ITV’s Loose Women to now hosting the dating series Love Island and Love Island Allstars. During the vogue recap Youtube video previously mentioned above, Maya talks about how even though she has been given these big opportunities, she says, “Growing up in a nonconventional way, you can think that you don’t belong in certain spaces sometimes, or that you would never be accepted.” Maya has become so successful that her net worth is a whopping £1.5 million. She has been the face of Dolce & Gabbana, has been on the cover of Vogue multiple times, and has become an inspiration for many other women in the presenting industry.