Jewel Staite was born in White Rock, British Columbia. The youngest of seven children, she modeled as a child and has acted since age six. She also attended the Vancouver Film School and worked at the Vancouver Youth Theatre. She began her career with appearances in television movies such as CBC’s “Liar, Liar” in 1993 and ABC’s “The Only Way Out”. In 1995, she had a key guest starring role in the third-season episode of “The X-Files”, “Oubliette”.
Jewel’s first co-starring role on a television series was as Catalina, the ship’s engineer, in the first season of the Nickelodeon science fiction television series “Space Cases” in 1996. This was immediately followed by her role as Rebecca “Becca” Fisher on the Disney Channel series “Flash Forward”, where she was the co-lead with Ben Foster, while in 2000 she appeared in a major role on the FOX Family Channel drama “Higher Ground”.
Jewel came to prominence in the role of Kaylee Frye in “Firefly” and the subsequent major motion picture “Serenity”. She wrote a chapter about the experience in the book “Finding Serenity”, called “Kaylee Speaks: Jewel Staite On Firefly”. In between, she played the recurring role of Heidi Gotts in the television series “Wonderfalls”.
Jewel was then cast as chief medical office Jennifer Keller in “Stargate Atlantis”, replacing Dr. Carson Beckett (played by Paul McGillion). Following that role she guest starred on both “Warehouse 13” as the love interest of Sheldon (played by Sean Maher, who portrayed her love interest Simon in “Firefly” and “Serenity”) and on an episode of Supernatural as a former love-interest of Sam Winchester.
Since then Jewel has starred in “The L.A. Complex”, in which she portrayed Raquel Westbrook, a struggling actress and the AMC crime drama, “The Killing”, as Caroline Swift, the girlfriend of Detective Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman). She has also appeared in shows such as “The Listener”, “Animism”, “State of Syn”, “Con Man”, “Legends of Tomorrow”, “Castle”, “Motive”, “Blindspot”, “The Good Doctor” and “The Magicians”.