Jim Rash is an American actor, comedian, producer, and screenwriter. He is known for playing Dean Craig Pelton on the NBC/Yahoo! sitcom Community. In 2012, he received a Golden Globe nomination and won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film The Descendants.

Rash was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he attended Charlotte Latin School. Both he and his sister were adopted. After graduating, he spent a post-graduate year at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He later attended University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of Pi Kappa Alpha.

Rash played Mr. Grayson / Stitches, a sidekick to the supervillain Royal Pain, in the 2005 film Sky High. He played Fenton on That '70s Show and Andrew (the "whore house guy") on Reno 911!. He guest starred in the final episode of Friends, and played Head T.A. Philip in Slackers. Since 2009, Rash has starred on Community as Craig Pelton, the dean of the community college in which the show takes place. Rash and comedy partner Nat Faxon moved into screenwriting, writing a pilot in 2005 for a series entitled Adopted, about an adult who finds out his parents are not his birth parents. The show did not take off.

Rash and Faxon wrote the screenplay for The Descendants, based on the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings. The script appeared on the 2008 edition of the Black List, which lists the most popular unproduced scripts in Hollywood at that time. The film was produced in Hawaii and starred George Clooney; it was released on November 18, 2011 to critical acclaim. The film received a Golden Globe nomination and won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Rash and Faxon co-wrote and directed the film The Way Way Back, which received a standing ovation at its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Parts of the film are based on Rash's teenage life. Rash is a member of the Los Angeles-based improvisational and sketch comedy troupe The Groundlings.

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