Jessica Blank is a writer, director, actor, and story consultant who trains leaders, candidates and organizations to harness the power of story. Her deep background in theater, film, and television as both creator and performer, and her award-winning work at the intersection of the arts and social change, have served as a laboratory to study how story can connect, inspire and motivate prosocial action.
Jessica is a Professor in the Graduate Drama Department at the Juilliard School and the Graduate Film Program at NYU/Tisch. She has worked closely on story projects with organizations including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, the ADL, Southern Poverty Law Center, the Innocence Project, Amnesty International, the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Campaign for Civilians in Conflict, Witness to Innocence, Coal River Mountain Watch, and the IRC. She works as a consultant on story strategy for progressive candidates, nonprofit organizations, and foundations; leads organizational trainings in story literacy; and trains and coaches leaders and changemakers to use the power of story to radically uplevel their impact. As a story and performance coach, she works with TV showrunners, Sundance-supported filmmakers, Off-Broadway playwrights, published novelists and Broadway actors. She has taught writing and speaking to veterans, wounded veterans’ caregivers, formerly incarcerated individuals, death row exonerees, and at numerous colleges and universities, and is a frequent panelist and speaker on story and social change.
As an artist, she created the multi-award-winning play THE EXONERATED (with Erik Jensen) (Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, Ovation, Fringe First, Herald Angel awards; awards from Amnesty International, American Bar Association, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Death Penalty Focus) as well as its award-winning film adaptation starring Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover. They also wrote the plays AFTERMATH, based on interviews they conducted with Iraqi refugees in Jordan in 2008 (NYTW; also directed; 2 Drama League noms; int’l tour), HOW TO BE A ROCK CRITIC, based on the writing of the rock critic Lester Bangs (also directed; Kirk Douglas, Steppenwolf, Public Theater) and COAL COUNTRY, a forthcoming major commission for the Public Theater with music by Grammy-winning songwriter Steve Earle. She directs theater regularly Off-Broadway and is also active as a writer, director, and actor for film and TV: her first feature film, ALMOST HOME (written and directed with Erik Jensen), premiered in fall of 2018, and their second feature, HOW TO BE A ROCK CRITIC, is in development with Likely Story. She has appeared as an actor in over three dozen films and TV shows.
