Jacobsen began her career in the SBS comedy series Pizza. She later appeared in the Australian soap opera Home and Away, playing Charlotte Adams from 2001 to 2002, and in the Australian science fiction series Farscape, as well as a number of TV commercials.
In 2007, Jacobsen landed the role of Kendra Shaw in Battlestar Galactica: Razor, a between-seasons television film of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series.[2] She also played Sam Tyler's future girlfriend in the original pilot of the American television show Life on Mars.
In 2008, she was cast on the Fox series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,[3] playing Jesse, a Resistance fighter and girlfriend of Derek Reese. She also played Yoshi in The Devil's Tomb.
In April 2009, Jacobsen was cast on The CW's revamped Melrose Place[4] in the role of medical student Lauren Yung.
In 2010, she acted in the science fiction film Quantum Apocalypse. In 2011, Jacobsen made a cameo appearance in the Two and a Half Men episode "People Who Love Peepholes" as Charlie's former girl friend, Penelope.
In 2012, she appeared in the 2012 detective thriller film Alex Cross (as played by Tyler Perry), as the businesswoman Fan Yau Lee, who becomes the first victim of the antagonist Picasso (Matthew Fox). Loosely based on the novel Cross by James Patterson, the film was the third installment of the Alex Cross film series and a reboot of said series.
