Jessica Gao is an American television writer and producer. She was born Hanford, California. Gao started her career as a writer on the Nickelodeon shows The Mighty B! and Back at the Barnyard. She continued to work for the network on shows such as Big Time Rush and Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, before leaving to freelance on other shows such as Adult Swim's Robot Chicken, Cartoon Network's The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange, and Disney XD's Lab Rats. Gao has also written for HBO's Silicon Valley, the French series Zip Zip, Seeso/Pluto TV's Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, and Comedy Central's Corporate.
She joined the writing room for the third season of Rick and Morty, acting as story editor on six episodes and writing the episode "Pickle Rick". For writing "Pickle Rick", Gao won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program at the 2018 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. While working on the show, Gao and the other female writers were subject to sexual harassment by members of the fanbase that were upset about the show hiring women in the writing room. Gao and Rick and Morty co-creator, Dan Harmon, collaborated on a podcast series entitled Whiting Wongs that discussed race and privilege in Hollywood. Gao also wrote and co-executive produced the second season of the show Take My Wife.
Gao left Rick and Morty after the third season to develop a sitcom for ABC, which landed a pilot episode order in 2019, directed by Jude Weng. The show revolved around a Chinese-American woman's relationship with her family. ABC passed on the sitcom, but the series was being shopped to other networks. In July 2019, she was chosen to write the script for the upcoming movie based on Sweet Valley High. In November 2019, she was hired as the lead writer for the Disney+ show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law which was released in August 2022.
