Building Worlds at the Intersection of Music, Film & Architecture

Strictly Elizabeth is the multidisciplinary world of Jessica Elizabeth Davenport—artist-architect, storyteller, and creator of Terminal 9, a sonic-visual universe that merges music, memory, and design into emotionally charged acts of transformation.

Jessica’s practice lives at the edge of genres and mediums: blending punk and pop, experimental film and architectural imagination, autobiographical depth and mythic scale. Strictly Elizabeth isn’t just a band—it’s a Greek chorus of many incarnations, performing as the drama of Terminal 9 unfolds across songs, comics, performances, and installations.

Rooted in personal reinvention, Jessica’s work is shaped by profound contrasts: born into a Pentecostal cult and widowed at 35. These collisions of identity, grief, place, and purpose have formed the emotional core of her work. After relocating to California, she found a creative renaissance in the West Coast's light, landscape, and psychic space—an influence that permeates the poetic futurism of Terminal 9.

Her latest project, Terminal 9 continues her exploration of storytelling through music, comics, and sheet music—a "comic songbook" that maps the emotional terrain of its characters through melody, architecture, and visual poetry. The story orbits haunted furniture, a shared dream, and a city suspended between memory and invention.

Whether designing spaces, scoring scenes, or performing live, Jessica brings together disparate parts of her experience with a DIY spirit and a design-minded rigor. Her past works—including the 2021 album Contemporary Construction and the award-winning animated short What Happened to Stephanie?—lay the groundwork for a larger vision: creating immersive, regenerative art rooted in empathy, storytelling, and belonging.

Strictly Elizabeth invites you inside the portal—where art becomes a mirror, and sound builds the world.

In 2019, Jessica formed, Strictly Elizabeth, and began releasing music and short films through her production label, Data Water Records. She is the writer of an award winning animated short film What Happened to Stephanie? which features the music of Strictly Elizabeth and has co-directed music videos for the band’s release, the self-penned “Coretta”. The video features artwork created and commissioned by Jessica, a protest sign series as well as a Robot Mural of the song’s namesake Coretta Scott King.

 Jessica was born in Indianapolis, completed college in Cincinnati and upon graduation headed for New York City where she carved out a successful career as an architect. That career eventually got her to San Francisco. After some personal tragedies in her life Jessica decided to dedicate herself to her aspirations to make music and films. This eventually led to joining the group Sunset Republic and meeting Chris Hughes who she began to work with, resulting in an EP of demos called Route in Blue.  

With the encouragement of the music community she had found in San Francisco, Jessica and Chris set out to make a full-length album. Shelter in Place was released to great acclaim in 2020 and built a solid following at college radio. On that album are the songs "Oscillation Friday", "Baby, C’Mon" and "Seduction Trash".  

Enter What Happened To Stephanie?, the short animation film. Using these three aforementioned songs she turned to her design talents and storyboarded a script for the 7-minute film. As the Executive Producer, Screenwriter and Artist Jessica teamed up with Director Ciro Ayla and his Provoke Films to create the animated short film. The triptych of songs provided the soundtrack for the stories of Liz and Stephanie, told in comic book style inspired by the artwork of Roy Lichtenstein.  

Praise for the film has been staggering, garnering 15 festival selections, and wining several awards. The festivals include the Los Angeles Film Awards (Best Music Video), Los Angeles Film & Script Festival (Best Animation), Los Angeles Rocks Film Festival (Best Animation & Best Editing), the San Francisco Indie Short Festival (Semi-finalist), Onyko Film Awards (Best Animation Finalist), Venice Shorts Film Awards (selection), Hollywood New Directors (Honorable Mention), and L.A.’s prestigious Dances With Films (downbeat selection).

In May of 2021 Strictly Elizabeth released Contemporary Construction, a collaboration with producer/musician Shane Soloski (Brian Wilson, Five For Fighting). It’s almost all original tunes including an ode to Coretta Scott King entitled “Coretta”. In reference to two of the songs on the album Jessica said, "‘Coretta‘ and ‘You and Free‘ have their origins in New York City ", she explained. " When I picked them back up in California, I began to feel them as premonitions. I realized that my searching for meaning and purpose in life was already here in these songs and the experiences of my grief shed light on their completion."   

Awash with complexity and contradiction, Strictly Elizabeth is a hymn to her and a psalm to silence; dreamy, heavy, light and dark with sweetly vicious confessions that cut and soothe and post punk grooves you won't soon forget.