Janae Bakken (born in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American television producer and screenwriter best known for her work on the television series Scrubs.
She has worked on Scrubs since 2001, as a writer, and in 2002 served as a story editor, but was promoted and until 2004, served as an executive story editor. From there to 2005, she worked as a co-producer and in 2006 became a producer, and between 2006 and 2007 was supervising producer of twenty episodes. Aside from Scrubs, she has written the 2005 film Artistic License and two episodes of Malcolm in the Middle's third season.
She once commented that almost all of the ideas brought into and discussed in the Scrubs' writers' room were parallel to the writers' own lives, and that she specifically had suggested a number of storylines and subplots based on her own life. She is a fan of The Beatles and Indigo Girls, as well as the film The Big Chill and the television series The Wonder Years.
She is an alumni of Northwestern University and has held a number of lectures at their School of Communication. She married actor Michael Cotter on April 24, 2004 and gave birth to their first son, Ansel Shepard Bakken Cotter, on January 4, 2008.