Paula Julie Abdul (born June 19, 1962 in San Fernando, California) is an American dancer, choreographer, singer, and television personality.

Abdul's Canadian-born Jewish mother, Lorainne Rykiss, is a former classical concert pianist. Her father, Harry Abdul, is an entrepreneur of Jewish Lebanese birth who grew up in Ohio and was once a livestock trader in Brazil. In an interview with Ebony Magazine on May 1990, Abdul says that the unrelenting curiosity about her ethnicity doesn't annoy her. Instead, she gladly responds to the numerous questions about whether she is Black, White or Latin. However, she holds firmly to her response, for she is who she is, and her stardom will not change that. Her parents divorced when she was 7. Abdul and her sister Wendy went to live with their mother after the divorce.