Jessica Kahkoska is an award-winning writer, producer, and researcher for theatre and television. She is most interested in work inspired by true stories and creative research, the American West, and community collaboration.
In TV, she has worked as a Researcher, Writer, and Producer on films and series for Netflix, Warner Bros Discovery (American Spirit, True Crime and Shine), CNN (Vegas: The Story of Sin City), Max Originals (They Called Him Mostly Harmless), the Oxygen Network (Sins of the South, New York Homicide), the Magnolia Network, the History Channel, and Peacock. She is currently the research producer on a new docuseries for ITV, writing a scripted podcast produced by QCODE, LuckyChap, and Elizabeth Cantillon, and developing an original series with Billy Magnussen's HappyBad Bungalow and Sony TV.
She is the 2023 recipient of the National Archive Foundation's Cokie Roberts Fellowship in Women's History, and simultaneously developing projects in the scripted and documentary space about the American women who worked at the Nuremberg Trials.
In theatre, she has premiered new plays and musicals in New York and across the country. She has World Premiere productions in 2025 at Northern Stage (The Vermont Farm Project) and the Colorado Spring Fine Arts Center (In Her Bones). She is currently under new work commissions from Broadway Licensing (Concord) and the Alley Theatre.
Other theatre projects include Wild Fire (Commissioned and World Premiere by Denver Center for the Performing Arts, upcoming at ZSpace), Letters to the President (with Michael Bello, 2024 Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals, Great Hall at Cooper Union), Agent 355 (with Preston Max Allen, New York Stage and Film, Roundabout Theatre Company, Signature Theatre Company), The Death of Desert Rose (with Elliah Heifetz, under commercial option, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat), Wild Home (Notch Theatre Company), and Nia (World Premiere: UNC Chapel Hill).
Jessica is the two-time recipient of the Marion International Fellowship in the Visual and Performing Arts (2017 and 2023), and has received the Marscio Visiting Scholarship at Denver University, an NEA “ArtWorks” Grant, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at Faberllull Olot (Spain), UCROSS (Wyoming), Green Box Arts (Colorado), Goodspeed Musicals (Connecticut), the Chautauqua Institution, and others.
She is proud to be a guest lecturer at Wesleyan University and on faculty at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.
BA: Northwestern University. MBA (in process): SUNY New Paltz