Jane Espenson

Infobox Writer
name = Jane Espenson

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caption = Jane Espenson in September 2006.
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occupation = screenwriter, television producer
nationality = American
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genre = Situation comedy, serial drama
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website = http://www.janeespenson.com/

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.

Early career

Espenson grew up in Ames, Iowa. [http://www.janeespenson.com/biography.php Biography of Espenson] from her website] While Espenson was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, she submitted several spec scripts for "" as part of a script submission program open to amateur writers instituted in 1989 by executive producer Michael Piller. [ [http://www.littlereview.com/getcritical/trektalk/fatjo.htm Lolita Fatjo on Writing for "Star Trek"] from "The Little Review" (a writer's personal website)] ; 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 [ [http://abctalentdevelopment.com/programs_writers.htm The Disney•ABC Writing Fellowship] from an ABC website] ; the fellowship led to work on a number of sitcoms, including Disney's animated comedy "Dinosaurs" and Touchstone Television's short-lived "Monty". [imdb name|0260870]

Work on "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. [ [http://www.worldcon.org/hy.html#03 The Hugo Awards By Year] from the Worldcon website]

Work on "Battlestar Galactica"

Espenson joined the crew of Sci Fi's "Battlestar Galactica" ("BSG") just after "", BSG's first television movie, was conceived. [ [http://www.janeespenson.com/archives/00000568.php 05/29/2008: Link Letters] , an entry from Esperson's writer's blog] 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". 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 [ [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2008/08/battlestar-gala.html Edward James Olmos will direct Cylon-centric special feature] from the Show Tracker blog of the "Los Angeles Times"] , news confirmed in her writer's blog. [ [http://www.janeespenson.com/archives/00000591.php 08/22/2008: Intestinal Fortitude] , an entry from Esperson's writer's blog]

Other work

Espenson has written episodes for several other television shows, includingepisode 4.17 ("Accession") of "",an episode ("Shindig") of "Firefly",an episode ("The Gamble") of "The O.C.", of "Gilmore Girls". She has also worked on "Angel","Tru Calling","The Inside","The Batman","Andy Barker, P.I.", and "Jake in Progress".

Espenson is the editor of "Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly" (BenBella Books, 2005, ISBN 1933771216), a collection of non-fiction essays on the short-lived television show "Firefly".

Linguistics studies

Espenson studied linguistics as an undergraduate and graduate at University of California, Berkeley. She worked as a cognitive linguistics research assistant for George Lakoff [ [http://araw.mede.uic.edu/~alansz/metaphor/METAPHORLIST.pdf Master Metaphor List] , compiled 1989-1991 by Lakoff, Espenson, and others, from a University of Illinois at Chicago website] , 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. [ [http://www.wam.umd.edu/~israel/lakoff-ConTheorMetaphor.pdf The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor] , published in "Metaphor and Thought" (1993, ISBN 0521405475)] 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 0465056741).

References

External links

*
* [http://cinema.usc.edu/podcasts/mp3/espenson.mp3 Jane Espenson] , an April 2007 episode (in MP3 format) of the USC School of Cinematic Arts podcast series