About

Jessica Hepburn is an award-winning author, arts producer and adventure activist who has become one of the UK’s leading voices on fertility and family, as well as endurance sport (even though she is the most unlikely athlete and doesn’t have children!) She has become a pioneer in inspiring people to live big and bravely when life doesn’t go to plan, and championing the benefits of going on adventures to improve your physical and mental health.

In 2022, Jessica became the first woman in the world to achieve ‘The Sea, Street, Summit Challenge’ – swim the English Channel, run a road marathon (London) and summit Mount Everest. She has been nominated as one of Amnesty International’s ‘Women of Suffragette Spirit’; ‘Woman of The Week’ in Stylist magazine; and won the Fertility Foundation’s inaugural  ‘Fertility Hero’ Award.

Formerly Executive Director of the Lyric Hammersmith – one of London’s leading theatres – Jessica led from inception to completion the theatre’s £20m capital redevelopment and was nominated as ‘Theatre Manager of the Year’. Whilst doing this, she was also trying to become a mother and went through eleven rounds of IVF at a range of UK fertility clinics which resulted in multiple miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy that almost took her life. It was during this time she first started writing, and she is now the author of three acclaimed books.

AUTHOR

​Jessica’s first book The Pursuit of Motherhood  was published in February 2014. It became an Amazon bestseller and catapulted her into the limelight as one of the first people prepared to talk openly about the stigma of infertility and unsuccessful IVF. Her second book 21 Miles: swimming in search of the meaning of motherhood was published in May 2018 (paperback released in April 2019) and became a ‘Mumsnet Summer Read’ and an ‘Outdoor Swimming Society Book of the Year’. Both books are also available on Amazon Audible, narrated by the author and are currently being developed for film by Erebus Pictures, adapted by Anoushka Warden with funding from the BFI. Jessica’s third book – a mountainous musical adventure – will be coming out in Spring 2024.

ARTS PRODUCER

Jessica began her arts career at Northern Stage, then Brighton Festival, before joining the Lyric Hammersmith where she was Executive Director for ten years until 2015. ​In 2016, after leaving the Lyric, she co-founded (with Gabby Vautier) Fertility Fest the world’s first arts festival dedicated to fertility, infertility and the science of making babies and modern families which quickly grew into a major international event. The last live edition of the festival took place at London’s Barbican in 2019 featuring artists including Maxine Peake and Benjamin Zephaniah. Smaller satellite festivals also took place nationally and internationally at The Fertility Show (the UK’s largest patient event) and ESHRE (the biggest fertility industry conference in the world). The festival’s mission was to use the power of the arts to improve IVF patient solidarity and support and raise all levels of discourse about reproductive science. It also spearheaded a ground-breaking campaign to improve fertility education in schools so young people have the best chance of creating the families they want in the future. In 2018 Fertility Fest’s Modern Families fertility education project reached the front page of The Times newspaper spawning a national media debate and the findings of the project were later published in the leading academic journal Human Fertility and described in peer review as providing a ‘mind-blowing perspective on infertility’. This all contributed to the Government’s announcement that from 2019, a broader approach to fertility education would be included on the curriculum for the first time.

ADVENTURE ACTIVIST

Jessica’s ‘adventure activism’ is, by her own admission, a bit of an accident as she hates exercise and considers herself to be the most unlikely athlete. However, over the last decade since ‘coming out’ about her infertility she has been taking on some of the world’s most iconic physical and mental endurance challenges to turn the sadness she’s been through into something positive and at the same time raise awareness of what it means to struggle to conceive (another of life’s toughest endurance challenges) as well as encourage new ways of thinking about family. She has run the London Marathon; swum the English Channel; and on 14th May 2022 summited Mount Everest and became the first woman in the world to achieve ‘The Sea, Street, Summit Challenge’  and one of only two women and the fourteenth person in history to complete the iconic ‘Pond to Peak’ Challenge. She is a member of the British Mountaineering Council; The Ramblers; The Long Distance Walkers Association; and the Serpentine, Hampstead Ponds and Dover Open Water Swimming Clubs; and has used her sporting challenges to raise thousands of pounds for charity including Fertility Network UK.

PRESS, PODCASTS & PUBLIC SPEAKING

​Jessica is a high-profile commentator in the press and media. She has written for the Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Grazia, Psychologies, Huffpost amongst others, and for two years wrote a column entitled From A Patient Perspective for Fertility Road magazine. She has appeared on numerous television and radio shows including BBC Breakfast, Good Morning Britain, This Morning, Panorama, Radio 2 Zoe’s Ball’s Breakfast Show as well as Radio 4’s PM, You and Yours, My Name Is… She was also part of a major feature length documentary on Channel 5 – entitled ‘Miscarriage: our story’.

Jessica also regularly speaks on podcasts, webinars and at live events. She’s been a guest on Emma Gannon’s Control, Alt, Delete Podcast; and has appeared on the Tough Girl Podcast and guest hosted Izzy Judd’s Let’s Talk Fertility. She also regularly chairs and speaks at arts, science and book festivals; book shops and book clubs; schools and universities – from Southbank’s Women of the World Festival to Waterstones, the University of the Third Age to the National Theatre.

TRUSTEESHIPS & DIRECTORSHIPS

Jessica has held a number of non executive positions in the world of fertility and the arts:- she has been a trustee of the national charity Fertility Network UK; a patient adviser to the HFEA, the government’s independent regulator of fertility treatment; and a member of the Fertility Education Initiative. She has also been a trustee/non executive director of numerous arts organisations including Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh,  Opera Holland Park, Crying Out Loud, Told By An Idiot and UK Theatre.

A FERTILITY ARCHIVE

In 2019 the Wellcome Trust initiated the process of acquiring Jessica’s personal and professional archive to ensure long term access to researchers and the public to what is increasingly becoming regarded as a ground-breaking body of work on fertility and family in the modern world.