Jane Espenson

Jane Espenson (born July 14, 1964) is an American television writer and producer.

Espenson has worked on both situation comedies and serial dramas.

She had a five-year stint as a writer and producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and shared a Hugo Award with Drew Goddard for her writing on the episode "Conversations with Dead People".

After her work on Buffy, she wrote and produced episodes of The O.C. and Gilmore Girls among other series.

In 1992 Espenson won a spot in the Disney Writing Fellowship, which led to work on a number of sitcoms, including ABC's comedy Dinosaurs and Touchstone Television's short-lived Monty.

This was followed by work on the short-lived sitcoms Me and the Boys, and Something So Right.

In 1997 she joined the writing staff of Ellen Degeneres's sitcom Ellen.

After years in sitcoms, Espenson decided to switch from comedic to dramatic writing and submitted her sample scripts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In 1998, Espenson joined Mutant Enemy Productions as executive story editor for the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Over the rest of the run of the series, Espenson wrote or co-wrote twenty-three episodes, starting with "Band Candy" and ending with Buffy's penultimate episode, "End of Days".

After her role as an executive story editor, she was promoted to co-producer in season four.

In the fifth season she was promoted again to producer.

She took up the role of supervising producer in the sixth season and was promoted once more to co-executive producer in the final season.

She wrote episodes both humorous (e.g. "Triangle" and "Intervention") and serious (such as "After Life").

Lakoff also mentioned her year-long work on the "metaphorical structure of causation" in the acknowledgments section of Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999, ISBN 0-465-05674-1).

While in graduate school, she submitted several spec scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation as part of a script submission program open to amateur writers; Espenson has referred to the program as the "last open door of show business".

Espenson and Drew Goddard co-wrote the seventh-season episode "Conversations with Dead People," for which they won the Hugo Award for Best Short Dramatic Presentation in 2003.

Espenson is credited as the writer or co-writer of the following Buffy episodes:

She also co-/wrote several comic book stories for Tales of the Slayers, Tales of the Vampires and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, the one-shots Jonathan and Reunion and the limited series Haunted.

Espenson joined the crew of Sci Fi's Battlestar Galactica (BSG) just after Battlestar Galactica: Razor, BSG's first television movie, was conceived.

As one of BSG's co-executive producers, she worked on every fourth-season episode starting with "He That Believeth in Me"; she was also the writer of "Escape Velocity" and "The Hub" and co-wrote The Face of the Enemy webisodes.

Prior to joining the show's staff she wrote one third-season episode and co-wrote another.

From 2006 to 2010, she worked on Battlestar Galactica and several projects related to it.

In August 2008, the Los Angeles Times broke the news that Espenson was the writer behind BSG's second television movie, The Plan, news confirmed in her writer's blog.

Between 2009 and 2010, she served on Caprica, as co-executive and executive producer and co-showrunner.

In January 2009 it was announced that she had joined the spin-off series Caprica as co-executive producer and would take on showrunner duties midway through the first season.

In 2010, she wrote an episode of HBO's Game of Thrones, eventually earning a Writers' Guild Award for her involvement with the show.

In 2011 she joined the writing staff for the fourth season of the British television program Torchwood, which aired on BBC One in the United Kingdom and Starz in the United States during mid-2011.

From 2011 to 2018, Espenson worked as a consulting producer and co-executive producer on ABC's series Once Upon a Time, and also wrote and directed some of the show's supplementary DVD content and helped develop the show's spin-off series.

She co-wrote and produced Husbands, an independent original web series, with co-creator Brad Bell.

She and Bell were nominated for a Writers' Guild Award for their work on the series.

Espenson also contributed writing to seasons 1 and 3 of the Marvel series Jessica Jones, and was an executive producer of the HBO series The Nevers.

She currently works on the Apple TV+ series Foundation.

She has written numerous comic books, edited multiple volumes of essays, and published several short stories.

Espenson grew up in Ames, Iowa, and graduated from Ames High School.

As a teenager, Espenson found out that M*A*S*H accepted spec scripts without requiring the writer to have industry representation.

Though she was not an established writer, she attempted to write a script.

She recalls, "It was a disaster. I never sent it. I didn't know the correct format. I didn't know the address of where to send it, and then I thought, they can't really hire me until I finish junior high anyway."

Espenson studied linguistics as an undergraduate and graduate at University of California, Berkeley.

She worked as a cognitive linguistics research assistant for George Lakoff, who acknowledged her work on the metaphorical understanding of event structure in English and credited her with recognizing the existence of the phenomenon of location-object duality in metaphors pairs.