Jessica Moye Tallman has been married to actor Mark Tallman since 2005, and for most of that marriage, she was the one with the more senior career. Tallman now plays a retired NBA star on the Apple TV+ drama Your Friends & Neighbors. Before that show existed, his wife spent sixteen years working her way up at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, finishing a graduate degree at night and eventually running the university’s fundraising office.
The two met in college, at different schools, and got engaged about a month after graduating. They married in 2005, in a small church in her hometown, and marked twenty years together in June 2025, People reported. At the University of Richmond, she was a Cigna Scholar, a program for students focused on social justice and leadership that has since been renamed after the civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill. Her LinkedIn profile also lists her as a commencement speaker there. The couple has two sons; neither has been named publicly.
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Two decades in university fundraising
She started working in fundraising in 2004, right after college, at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, where she eventually oversaw a $700,000 annual giving program. Pratt Institute hired her in 2008 as a director of alumni relations, according to her LinkedIn profile. In a 2011 interview with the school’s own staff newsletter, she said her job was keeping alumni connected to the school, and that she spent her free time exploring Brooklyn restaurants.
She left Pratt for about a year to direct gifts at the Trinity-Pawling School, then returned in 2012 and kept climbing through the university’s development office, becoming executive director of development in 2018, a decade after she joined. By 2021, she was associate vice president for institutional advancement, leading donor trips to Italy and then Korea and the Philippines, and helping the school secure its first endowed professorship. She was promoted again two years later, to vice president for institutional advancement, leading a development team of 35. By her own account, the promotion came during a leadership transition at the school, and fundraising did not lapse.
Two changes in the same spring
That vice president post lasted about a year. In late March 2024, Mark Tallman was cast in Your Friends & Neighbors, the role that would become the biggest of his career. The following month, his wife stepped down from her post at Pratt and began advising the university’s president directly, on contract rather than as staff. By May, she had also started her own firm, The Moye Tallman Group, offering philanthropy, strategy and partnership advice.
Two unrelated career decisions, made weeks apart, landed in the same spring. Neither has spoken publicly about the timing.
Tallman plays a retired NBA star opposite Jon Hamm and Amanda Peet on the show. Before that, he spent three seasons on BET’s First Wives Club, and the couple have appeared together at industry events going back to at least 2019, when that earlier show launched on BET+. Apple renewed Your Friends & Neighbors for a third season in February 2026, before the second season had even premiered. That second season arrived in April and went on to earn an Emmy nomination for outstanding drama series.
In an interview with Numรฉro Netherlands, Tallman said family comes first these days, and that much of their free time goes to what feels like “100 soccer practices and games every week.” Away from the show, the couple has also turned up together at events like a screening of Disney’s Moana in New York this July, where they were seen with their two sons.
His wife gave a similar answer when asked the same kind of question back in 2011, more than a decade before the show existed. Hers was Brooklyn restaurants.
