Karrueche Tran

Background

Karrueche Tran was born Karrueche Minters on May 17, 1988, in Los Angeles, California. She attended Fairfax High School but transferred to Birmingham High School from where she graduated in 2006. Tran has always loved the fashion industry and started out her career as a personal shopper. She worked at Nordstrom for three years before breaking out on her own as a freelance stylist for celebrities in Hollywood. This was around the time that she and Chris Brown started their relationship. She gained respect and a name for herself and began modeling for brands in and around Hollywood. She landed her first big modeling job in 2013 for the “Lady Crooks” fashion line, the women’s division of the “Crooks and Castles” summer collection. Tran gained a wider audience when she starred as Vivian Johnson in the web series “The Bay” that year up until 2016. The show was incredibly popular, winning an Emmy Award. Tran herself won two Daytime Emmy Awards for her performance and involvement in the show.

This, however, did not deter Tran from her modeling career as she appeared in the photography book “Love West Coast Girls,” which was compiled and photographed by Mike Miller in 2014. In the same year, Tran pushed herself even further and launched her hosting career through a job on the B.E.T. Awards red carpet and other events during the B.E.T. Weekend, as well as co-hosting the B.E.T. show “106 & Park.” She also received a role in the movie “The Fright Nite Files.” Tran continued with her modeling and was featured in the Spring/Summer lookbook for Le Coq Sportif, a French athletic brand. She appeared on covers of magazines such as “Rolling Out,” “Annex Magazine,” and “Flaunt Magazine,” alongside two feature stories on Elle.com. She landed a modeling contract with Wilhelmina Models in 2015, and bagged her first feature film “3-Headed Shark Attack,” a role in the short film “PrXde,” and in the fashion web series “Vanity” as the character Vanessa Ivy. She split with Brown the same year, amidst much controversy.

In 2016, Tran landed the lead in the movie “Only for One Night,” playing a married woman whose sister drugs her husband and sleeps with him. She also collaborated with ColourPop Cosmetics to release her own beauty collection “KaePop.” In 2017, after she departed from “The Bay,” she landed a role in T.N.T’s television series “Claws.” She joined the series “Deputy,” playing the recurring role of Genevieve in 2018. She returned to “The Bay” in 2020, and in 2021, she won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Performance by a Lead Actress in a Daytime Fiction Program.