Jenn Bokoch Gillett (she/her) is a playwright, performer, educator, and storyteller. She has devoted her career to creating interview-based theater featuring underrepresented voices and utilizing various mediums such as puppetry, audio recordings, movement, and music. Her goal is to place real words, experiences, and stories onstage; both so that audiences can reflect upon them, and so that real people can see and hear themselves in a script. Jenn also has a special focus on centering stories of reproductive justice and birth equity in her work.
Jenn was the Artistic Management Committee Chair at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood from 2014-2016. Her plays have been performed in New York and Los Angeles, with the support of organizations such as Dixon Place, The Center at West Park, Verbatim Perfomance Lab, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and The Omega Women’s Leadership Center. She currently works as an Arts Partnership Manager at Marquis Studios in Brooklyn, and as a practicing full-spectrum Doula certified through Ancient Song. Previous positions include: working as a Teaching Artist through The Unusual Suspects Theatre Company in LA public schools; the Tenement Museum, where she led tours with a focus on real untold stories of the immigrant experience; at The Skirball Cultural Center, where she facilitated the Build A Better World program in partnership with local schools and community organizations; as the Arts Education Manager at St Nicks Alliance, where she hired, trained and placed Teaching Artists in Brooklyn public schools; and at the La Brea Tar Pits where she operated a life-sized Saber-Toothed Cat puppet built by the Jim Henson Creature Shop. Jenn is proud to hold an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU, and draws from this experience to elevate voices from the community in her theatre praxis.
As a performer, Jenn has worked as an actor onstage and in VO, voicing campaigns for Jergens, SmileCrafters, and numerous other commercials, PSAs, and audiobooks. She has also been a full-suit puppeteer for many years, including working as an original puppeteer for The Watcher from Sony Playstation’s Horizon Zero Dawn. Jenn is a former Parent Artist Space Grantee at BAX in Brooklyn; and is currently working on a new theatre and oral history project on the Benedictine Nun community. Her greatest ongoing gig is that of being a Mom to her son Lawrence Matteo, age 4.
Check out some of Jenn’s latest interview-based theatre work through the Natural History Museum of LA County
Photos by David Chan, Taylor Martin, Steve Cohn