SHEINELLE JONES IS LEARNING to dance. Not that she needs help. Anyone who knows her is well aware that she can break out a Janet Jackson or Beyoncé move like a seasoned pro.
But this isn’t that sort of dance.
Instead, it’s the groove she’s establishing with Jenna Bush Hager, a longtime friend, colleague and now fellow co-host of the newly launched TODAY with Jenna & Sheinelle.
For more than a year, TODAY’s fourth hour was helmed by Jenna with a rotation of guest co-hosts after Hoda Kotb departed the show in January 2025. Now, finally, the search is over as Sheinelle permanently takes that seat alongside Jenna.
“I love to dance. But it’s a new dance for me,” Sheinelle says. “So right now I’m just trying to look at the moves, pick up the steps and make it my own as a dancer would.”
This chapter is a dream realized for Sheinelle, who grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and imagined herself sitting behind an anchor desk as far back as elementary school. She created a vision board on her childhood bedroom wall made up of photos of local newscasters, which she hung beside affirmations her mother jotted down on Post-Its, long before vision boards were even a thing.
By the time she reached high school, Sheinelle was interning at a local news station and continued to pursue broadcasting as a student at Northwestern University. It was there she had a chance meeting with Uche Ojeh, a high school senior who was visiting campus with his father.
Though Sheinelle wasn’t a tour guide, she became one that day, offering to show the “cute” student around. She didn’t know at the time that she’d go on to marry him and raise together three children, Kayin, 16, and twins Clara and Uche, 13.
@sheinelle_o via Instagram
What she also couldn’t have known was that the unusual stutter Ojeh developed in October of 2023 was the result of an aggressive form of brain cancer that ultimately took his life in May of last year.
Shortly after losing her husband, Sheinelle’s beloved “Grandmama,” Josephine Vonceal Pace Brown, a pivotal figure in Sheinelle’s life and one of her most ardent supporters, died seven months later on New Year’s Eve.
So this new chapter for Sheinelle is one that has delivered, in equal parts, a lifelong aspiration alongside personal loss so profound, the TODAY host says she longs for the day she doesn’t have to “fight for my joy.”
“We can’t just act like there’s not a big old elephant there,” Sheinelle says of her losses.
Despite there being days when she says it’s hard to get out of bed, Sheinelle has also been given the opportunity she’s spent years working for and is choosing to embrace it head on.
“The truth is, I am front and center now, and people are watching to see what this new chapter will be,” she explains. “I mean, if Uche were alive, and everything was as it was, and I got this job, it was going to be a big deal. But considering what I’ve been through, it’s more than a reality show. You wouldn’t even believe it.”
And, like TODAY viewers, Sheinelle is waiting to see just how it’s all going to play out. “I’m like, ‘What are you going to do now? What are you going to do with this?’ I’m out-of-body watching myself — and I’m rooting for me.”