Writing, Performing, Producing

Jake-ann Jones is an award-winning writer, director, performer, and producer; her career has brought her into collaboration with some of today’s most inspired, provocative, and notable artists in the disciplines of film, theatre, and dance.  

Jones began her career as an actress and performance artist on stage, working with writers, composers, and directors including Fred Holland, Butch Morris, Craig Harris, Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Greg Tate, Adrienne Kennedy, Shay Youngblood, Diana Amsterdam, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Judith Jackson, at venues including the New York Shakespeare Festival, Ohio Theatre, Soho Rep, Aaron Davis Hall, Dixon Place, Company One, and Penumbra Theatre.  

She appeared in films including NORMA’S LAMENT, SMILE, MALCOLM X, and performed the lead role in Bridgett Davis’ award-winning independent feature film NAKED ACTS. She also wrote and performed BED OPUS 1 & 2 with choreographer Cynthia Oliver at Aaron Davis Hall and Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and directed Keith Antar Mason’s KASSANDRA’S TALE at the Public Theater during the Mumia 911 Festival.

Prior to writing and producing for film and television, Jones garnered acclaim for her work in the theatre as a playwright (including Portrait of the Artist as a Soul Man Dead (Penumbra Theater, St. Paul), U(nder) F(rank) O(bservation)(New York Theater Workshop), Magic Kingdom (New Georges/Hourglass Theater Company), Black Bitches Brew (Company One, Aaron Davis Hall).

Her play, Death of a Ho: A Fairy, Scarey, Whorey Tale has was published by Theater Communications Group (TCG) in their anthology, PLAYS FROM THE BOOM BOX GALAXY. She co-wrote the Urban World/HBO Film Festival’s Grand Prize-winning screenplay SPOOK CITY with Gabriel Tolliver.

Jones recently completed the feature-length screenplay CUDHIAL for the LA-based production company SunHaus Films. She was also the co-writer and co-producer of the Gabriel Tolliver series MONDO BLACK produced by BlackPublic Media and spent five years as a producer/writer on an internationally televised TV talk-show with a Tampa, Florida-based media entity.

Her poetic essay RAINBOW(eyes) is featured in British photographer Gerald Jenkins’ photonovel It’s After The End Of The World. She is author of Civil Rights activist, journalist, and press secretary Florence L. Tate’s biographical memoir, Sometimes Farmgirls Become Revolutionaries: Notes on Black Power, Politics, Depression and the FBI, released by Black Classic Press in 2021.

Jones received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and a BFA in Theatre from CCNY. She has taught at the City University of New York, the College of New Rochelle, The Writer’s Voice at the YMCA, and Brown University.

She currently writes and produces video and community programs for The Weekly Challenger Newspaper and is on the board of the nonprofit Pinellas Diaspora Arts Project in St. Petersburg, FL, where she produces the Tampa Bay Afrofuturism Festival, organizes popup events, and runs the R.O.Y.A.L. (Reaching Our Youth Arts League) Project.

In 2022 she was awarded Artist Laureate for Creative Pinellas.