Jane Pickett is a writer/director based in Los Angeles. In 2008, she received her MFA in Writing for Performance from CalArts, and her play Autopilot was featured in the REDCAT NOW and Philadelphia and Edinburgh fringe festivals. In 2009, she directed her play Someone in Florida Loves Me, reviewed by the New York Times and awarded Critic’s Pick in Backstage. In 2010, she traveled to Cuba as head writer on a collaboration between Cuban and American artists. A hybrid of theater and cinema, The Closest Farthest Away premiered at the Havana International Film Festival and the script was published in a 2011 edition of TheatreForum.
In 2011, Jane was accepted into The American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women and made The Men’s Room, which screened in festivals all over the world including Outfest and Seattle International Film Festival, and won numerous awards, including First Prize - Alternative Spirit Award at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, Emerging Filmmaker Award - Best Men’s Drama Short at the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and Best Cinematography at the Mimi LGBT Short Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain. In 2013, her short film What Happened to Bill received 3rd place in the MacArthur Foundation Looking@Democracy competition to answer the question - How might we together strengthen American democracy?
In 2016, her short A Little Less Conversation screened in the Rhode Island International Film Festival and BendFilm, and in the spring of 2017, she pitched a film to creative executives in The Fly franchise as a finalist in the inaugural 20th Century Fox Bridge program to increase the number of female directors working in studio film. In 2018, she created campaign spots for two midterm candidates and, as a result, was invited to shoot a merger between several independent political parties. Since 2019, while teaching at CalArts and Chapman University, she created videos for Incite Studio, generating effective digital content across the progressive movement for clients such as Fellow Americans, Climate Power, NARAL, and Building Back Together.