Basketball point guard and team owner Renee Danielle Montgomery was born on December 2, 1986, in St. Albans, the daughter of Ron and Bertlela Snook Montgomery. Encouraged by her father, who built a basketball court in the family driveway and coached her in Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) competition, she could skillfully dribble a ball by the time she was three.

Montgomery attended South Charleston High School, where she led the Black Eagles to three consecutive state championship games. Playing alongside teammate Alexis Hornbuckle, the team defeated Morgantown High School for the title in 2003 and Greenbrier East High School in 2004 before falling to Morgantown in 2005. Montgomery served as team captain each year and averaged 22.5 points, six assists, five rebounds, and five steals over her high school career. In 2005, she won the Mary Ostrowski Award as the state’s top girls’ basketball player. She also played soccer for the school.

Montgomery continued her career at the University of Connecticut. She helped lead the Huskies to the Final Four in 2008 and to an undefeated national championship her senior season in 2009. That year, she earned the Nancy Lieberman Award as the nation’s top Division I women’s point guard. During her collegiate career, she was a two-time All-American and set the Connecticut school record for total games played (150). At the time she graduated, she ranked among the program’s leaders in several categories: sixth in points (1,990), sixth in field goals (703), fourth in three-pointers (254), ninth in free throws (330), third in assists (632), and fifth in steals (266).

In the 2009 WNBA draft, Montgomery was selected fourth overall by the Minnesota Lynx—the same draft position as her former high school teammate Hornbuckle the previous year. During her WNBA career, she played for the Minnesota Lynx (2009, 2015-17), Connecticut Sun (2010-14), Seattle Storm (part of 2015), and Atlanta Dream (2018-19), winning two titles with the Lynx (2015, 2017). She received the WNBA’s Sixth Woman of the Year Award in 2012.

Like many professional players, Montgomery also competed internationally during the WNBA off-season. She played for clubs in Lithuania, Israel, Russia, Turkey, Australia, and Poland between 2009 and 2018.

After retiring from professional basketball, she began working as a TV commentator and became active in business and philanthropy. In 2019, she founded the Renee Montgomery Foundation to promote equality in women’s sports. Through her podcast, Montgomery and Co., she has advocated for social justice and early childhood education.

In 2021, she joined the ownership group of the Atlanta Dream and was named the team’s vice president. She was the first former WNBA player to hold an ownership stake in a league franchise. She also became a co-owner of Atlanta’s FCF Beasts, an indoor football team that plays in the Fan Controlled Football (FCF) league. She is that league’s first woman team owner.

Her life and activism were the subject of the documentary A Radical Act: Renee Montgomery (2024), directed by Sandrine Orabona and co-produced by LeBron James. In 2026, she joined the CC League by Chanel Beauty as a mentor. The initiative encourages women athletes to “explore identity, movement, beauty, and self-expression beyond the game.”

She is married to musician Sirena Grace.