Directory Profile

Michelle Denise Jackson is a writer born and raised in Southern California. She studied theatre arts at California State University Long Beach before transferring to New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where earned a B.A. in 2011 in her self-designed concentration (obnoxiously) titled, "(Re)Constructing/Imagining Reality through Narrative and Performance."

Upon leaving New York and returning to SoCal, Michelle worked at the intersection of youth empowerment, community organizing, and the arts. She co-founded a grassroots community organization, ¡DUENDE!, which provided writing workshops and performance opportunities to youth in Los Angeles County. She worked at Planned Parenthood, helping to lead their school-based and youth sex education programs, before going on to co-found the South LA Youth Advisory Council for Reproductive Health and its annual youth-led event, Spring Into Love, which celebrates reproductive health and sex education.

In 2014, Michelle transitioned into writing and editing full-time, becoming a contributing writer and eventual senior editor at For Harriet, a leading online platform for Black women. She left For Harriet in 2015 to pursue her MFA at USC in the  John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television. While a grad student at SCA, she was a recipient of both the Annenberg Graduate Fellowship and the Edward Small Screenwriting Award. She also coordinated the John Wells Division's annual networking event, First Pitch. She received her MFA in 2017.

Since leaving SCA, Michelle has worked for some of the most talented and influential writers and producers in television. Immediately after graduating from USC, she was a writers' PA on season 14 of ABC's long-running medical drama, GREY'S ANATOMY, created by powerhouse showrunner Shonda Rhimes. She then went on to work as the writers' assistant on the critically acclaimed FX limited series, MRS. AMERICA, created by Dahvi Waller (who was her professor at USC) and EP'd Stacey Sher.

In 2019, she was staffed as a writer on PIECES OF HER, an upcoming Netflix thriller series created by Charlotte Stoudt and EP'd by Bruna Pappandrea. She has since been a writer on the upcoming HBO Max series GENERATION, EP'd by Lena Dunham, and the upcoming Netflix series MAID, based on the bestselling memoir of the same name and created by Molly Smith Metzler and EP'd by John Wells.

Michelle writes stories that center and celebrate people from marginalized communities doing the messy work of becoming their whole and free selves. 

In 2020, she proudly began teaching in the John Wells Division.