Jayne Harrison was born October 27, 1951 in Washington, D.C., to machinist Herbert Harrison and his wife, Virginia. Harrison attended Wickliffe High School in Wickliffe, Ohio. She represented Wickliffe High School at the American Legion’s Girls State mock-government program and was elected as a senator to the American Legion’s Girls Nation program in Washington D.C. where she won the office of Vice President of the United States and was sworn into office by then VP Spiro T. Agnew. While still in high school, Kennedy was crowned Miss Ohio USA in 1970 (she was the first African American woman to win the title), and was one of the 15 semi–finalists in the 1970 Miss USA Pageant. It was rare for an African American woman at that time to be in the contest.
In 1971, Kennedy and her then-husband Leon Isaac Kennedy moved to California to pursue careers in acting. She began with a stint on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In as a Dancer. She traveled as one of the Hollywood Deb Stars on Bob Hope's Bases Around The World Christmas Tour that included stops in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cuba.
Kennedy has been on the covers of Ebony, Jet, and Essence magazines numerous times. In the early 1980s she wrote, produced and starred in the Love your Body exercise videos and produced the first in-flight exercise in the sky program for American Airlines, A Aerobics, at the same time, she also had worked as a corporate spokeswoman for Esoterica, Jovan, Revlon, Fashion Fair Cosmetics, Bankers Systems, Butterick Patterns and 6 years with Coca-Cola's Tab and Diet Coke. Beginning in the 1990s, Kennedy moved away from the limelight to spend more time with her family.
A year after high school, Harrison met Leon Isaac Kennedy, a DJ and a struggling actor/writer. They married in 1971. Motown singer/songwriter Smokey Robinson served as best man at their wedding, they later divorced in 1982. In 1985, Kennedy married actor Bill Overton. They have four children: his daughter Cheyenne (1982) and their three daughters Savannah Re (b. November 20, 1985), Kopper Joi (b. May 17, 1989) and Zaire Ollyea (b. September 15, 1995).
Kennedy won the NAACP Theater Award for Best Producer along with her current husband Bill Overton for their production of the highly acclaimed staged musical, The Journey of the African American. Kennedy is also an Emmy Award winner for her coverage of the Rose Parade and was nominated for an Emmy for her coverage of the news feature on Soldiers on the DMZ in South Korea for NBC’s Speak Up America in 1980. Ebony Magazine announced as "One of the 20 Greatest Sex Symbols of the 20th Century," and in the 1980s, Coca Cola USA named Jayne Kennedy "The Most Admired Black Woman in America".
