About

Jessica Ernst has been directing and producing in the greater Boston area since 2009. She has directed productions for spaces as varied as mid-size NEAT theatres, a working brewery, parks, a cabaret space, and a community center, and she relishes the quest to find new ways for theatre to interact with the world. 

Jess’s directing career includes two fully-produced world premieres: The Women Who Mapped The Stars, by Joyce Van Dyke (The Nora Theatre Co., 2018), and The Weaver of Raveloe, by Erica Glenn and Melissa Leilani Larson (Oberon, 2014). She has also directed staged readings, workshops, and/or festival productions of another dozen (and counting) new works, collaborating closely with playwrights each time. This breadth of new play development experience led her to the position of Managing Director of Sleeping Weazel, a multimedia experimental theatre company dedicated to new works with social justice ideals. As a director, producer, and administrator, Jess builds strong partnerships with playwrights that get to the heart of the “why” of each play, considering and incorporating all of the possibilities of the theatrical medium into the development of the text as early as possible.

In addition to new works, Jess also directs the classics, particularly Shakespeare. Her approach to Shakespeare emphasizes actor ownership and demystifying the text through collaborative textual analysis, a sense of playfulness in the action, and joy in the musicality of the language. Her adaptation of The Tempest, for example, was developed in collaboration with Deaf theatre artists to generate a bilingual English/Sign Language production that honors the unique expressive qualities of both signed and spoken language. Performed with both hearing and Deaf actors, it explores the deep connections between language, magic, colonization, and freedom that reverberate through the play.

Passionate about new play development and process-driven work, Jess assembles casts and design teams early on, including all creatives in brainstorming, staged readings, and workshops in order to ensure a unified vision with rich storytelling coming from every theatrical element. Her directing process is heavily influenced by the Tectonic Theatre Project’s technique of Moment Work, as well as Viewpoints practice.

As an assistant director, Jess has worked at The Huntington Theatre Company, New Repertory Theatre, and Actors’ Shakespeare Project. In 2022, she was Sleeping Weazel’s lead producer in a collaborative co-production with ArtsEmerson of the world premiere of Everyday Life and Other Odds and Ends, by Charlotte Meehan. This multimedia play with dance received widespread audience acclaim and an Elliot Norton Award nomination for Outstanding Choreography.

Jess holds an MS in Arts Administration from Boston University and a BA in Theatre Arts and English from Gettysburg College.

In addition to her theatrical work, Jess spent over a decade in the restaurant industry and is always ready to talk food, wine, and Boston restaurants. She lives in Boston with her partner and their two one-eyed cats.