Heather Juergensen was raised in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in 1987, she began writing and performing for the stage in both New York and Los Angeles. While at an acting and writing workshop sponsored by New York's Ensemble Studio Theater, she noticed that she was writing material similar to another actress-writer in attendance named 'Jennifer Westfeldt'. They began to collaborate and wrote a series of scenes produced off-Broadway under the name 'Lipschtick'. The response to one of the scenes inspired them to write a film script about two straight women who fall into a romantic relationship. The film was developed by a studio but not produced. They held script readings and sold shares to buy back the script rights and pay for the film's production. The result was the award-winning film, Kissing Jessica Stein (2001). Since the successful release of that project, Heather has either written or rewritten several stage, film and television properties, including a play about Brooklyn.