Meet Jen
Jen Lunsford has represented the east side suburbs of Monroe County in the New York State Assembly since 2021. A working mom and career attorney, she flipped the 135th District in 2020 and has twice been re-elected by her neighbors in Penfield, East Rochester, Perinton, Pittsford, and Mendon.
Jen lives in Perinton with her husband, Scott, and their son. Before taking office, she spent her legal career representing injured and disabled New Yorkers at some of the most difficult moments in their lives — and that's the perspective she brings to everything she does in Albany.
Jen was raised on Long Island by a working mom and a stay-at-home dad — not exactly the norm in the 1980s. Her mother worked as a secretary and later as a sales manager; her father, a Vietnam veteran and former NYPD officer, returned to the workforce once Jen started school. Jen graduated with honors from Hartwick College in political science and philosophy, then earned her law degree at Boston University, where she concentrated in health care law, won the Dean's Award for Constitutional Law, and served as an editor of the American Journal of Law and Medicine. After law school, she settled in Rochester to start her family and her legal career — representing injured workers and disabled people, and volunteering with Rochester Teen Court, the Center for Youth's Crisis Nursery, the Volunteer Legal Services Project, Empire Justice Center, and the American Lung Association.
It is so easy to just stick a label on someone and write them off, but when you take the time to get to know people one to one you see that we are far more alike than we are different.
In office, Jen has put that experience to work. When her three-year-old son was hospitalized after an allergic reaction, she wrote the law — signed in 2025 — that now requires allergen labels on prepackaged foods sold at delis, bakeries, and food trucks across New York, so no other family has to go through what hers did.
As a working mom who knows firsthand how crushing childcare costs can be, Jen has made affordability her signature fight: she passed the law ensuring parents who lose childcare can collect unemployment insurance, and helped win a $20 million universal childcare pilot for Monroe County, fully funded public schools, and universal pre-K statewide by 2028.
And Jen never stops showing up at home. She has delivered more than $1.4 million in direct aid for Perinton and Fairport, over $500,000 for East Rochester, and $400,000 for the new YMCA childcare center in Penfield — and her district office on Main Street in East Rochester is open to any neighbor who needs help navigating a state agency. As Jen puts it: that's what we're for.