James Serpento is a largely Midwestern performing artist, filmmaker, and educator, having been raised in Iowa, and educated at Iowa State University (Ames) and Indiana University (Bloomington). He credits such Midwestern institutions as Chicago Dramatists, the Bloomington Playwrights Project and the Iowa Scriptwriters Alliance with his development as a writer for stage and screen.

His favorite city is Chicago, where he spent a number of years as an actor, director, writer and teacher before moving on to Los Angeles, where he has worked primarily as a director onstage, and to which he occasionally returns.

His current projects are a musical version of Euripides' "The Bacchae," for which he co-authored book and lyrics with Jeff Charis-Carlson, with music by Sarah Evans; and two new plays, "Every Cottage Home" (co-authored with Louise Bylicki), and "Doll" (about Franz Kafka). A collection of new short plays, "Love, For Short," co-authored with R. Andrew White, adapted from works of Anton Chekhov, was published in 2021.

He has one child, a son named Samuel.