Description:

Jessica Adams leads the Public Diplomacy Section of the Embassy of the United States of American in Bern and serves as its Spokesperson since August 2023. Her team advances U.S. foreign policy through cultural, educational, and people-to-people exchange programs. 

Jessica most recently worked at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she was the Public Diplomacy Advisor for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Her team promoted racial justice by creating the Department’s first ever Juneteenth toolkit, produced State’s inaugural Transgender Day of Visibility program, and enabled U.S. Embassies worldwide to recognize the first federal Indigenous Peoples’ Day with social media content. Jessica also served domestically as a Career Development Officer and a Policy Officer for Public Diplomacy. 

Her previous overseas assignments include re-building Syria’s public diplomacy and press operations while based in Turkey. Before that, she was the Director of America House in Jerusalem and oversaw similar cultural spaces in Gaza and the West Bank. Jessica served in Cyprus as a cultural attaché and a political officer and was a vice consul in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Jessica speaks German, Arabic, Turkish, and Spanish and also studied Hebrew. 

Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 2007, Jessica was a management consultant at several leading international firms including Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM, and Booz Allen Hamilton. She was honored to work on the original 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.

Jessica graduated from Northwestern University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology and a minor in history. Jessica enjoys swimming and is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, thanks to the service of her Swiss-born, six-times great-grandfather, John George Burckhardt, a bodyguard to General George Washington.