Jane Espenson is an American television writer and producer who has worked on both situation comedies and serial dramas. She is perhaps best known for her five-year stint as a writer and producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, work for which she shared in a Hugo Award. In 2009-2010 she served on Caprica, as co-executive and executive producer for the series. In 2010 she wrote an episode of HBO's A Game of Thrones, and joined the writing staff of The New World, which will air on Starz in the US and the BBC in the UK in 2011.
Espenson grew up in Ames, Iowa. While Espenson was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, she submitted several spec scripts for 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."
Her next break was a spot in the Disney Writing Fellowship, which led to work on a number of sitcoms, including Disney's animated comedy Dinosaurs and Touchstone Television's short-lived Monty. Espenson was then hired as a staff writer at Ellen. After a year, Espenson decided to switch from comedic to dramatic writing and applied for a position at Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In 1998, Espenson joined Mutant Enemy Productions as executive story editor for the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Espenson wrote or co-wrote twenty-three episodes, starting with "Band Candy" and ending with Buffy's penultimate episode, "End of Days."
She wrote episodes both humorous (e.g. "Triangle" and "Intervention") and serious (such as "After Life"). 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.
In addition, Espenson is credited as the writer or co-writer of the following Buffy episodes: "Band Candy," "Gingerbread," "Earshot," "The Harsh Light of Day," "Pangs," "Doomed," "A New Man," "Superstar," "The Replacement," "Listening to Fear," "Checkpoint," "I Was Made to Love You," "Flooded," "Life Serial," "Doublemeat Palace," "Same Time, Same Place," "Sleeper," "First Date," "Storyteller," and "End of Days."
Battlestar Galactica and Caprica
Espenson joined the crew of Sci Fi's Battlestar Galactica (BSG) just after Razor, BSG's first television movie, was conceived. As one of BSG's co-executive producers, she has 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. In August 2008, the Los Angeles Times broke the news that Espenson is the writer behind BSG's second television movie, The Plan, news confirmed in her writer's blog. In January 2009 it was announced that she had joined the spin-off series Caprica as co-executive producer and will take on showrunner duties midway through the first season.
Other
Espenson has written episodes for several other television shows, includingepisode 4.17 ("Accession") of Deep Space Nine,an episode ("Shindig") of Firefly,an episode ("The Gamble") of The O.C., andtwo fourth season episodes of Gilmore Girls. She has also worked onAngel,Tru Calling,The Inside,The Batman,Andy Barker, P.I.,Jake in Progress, Dollhouse and is the co-creator of Warehouse 13.
Espenson is the editor of Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly (BenBella Books, 2005, ISBN 1-933771-21-6), a collection of non-fiction essays on the short-lived television show Firefly.
Torchwood creator Russell T Davies has hired Espenson to write for the show's fourth series, to be broadcast in 2011.
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. 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).
