Bio.

Chelsea Sutton is a playwright, fiction writer, director, and immersive experience creator for weird, fantastical dystopias with a sense of humor.

FICTION

Chelsea was a 2016 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and is member of the Clarion UCSD “Ghost Class” 2020/2022 Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in CRAFT Literary, Bourbon Penn, The Texas Observer, The Dread Machine, Exposition Review, Cosmonaut Avenue, Luna Station Quarterly, The Cost of Paper, The Rattling Wall’s special issue Only Light Can Do That, Pithead Chapel, Blood Orange Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, the storytelling podcast Short Stack Stories, Five Quarterly,  Sequestrum, F(riction), Speculative City and the anthology Mooncalves. She was a writer in residence at Willapa Bay AiR and at the 2017 Tin House Writers Conference. She was the winner of the 2017 Exposition Review Flash Fiction Prize and the 2011 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Competition, as well as a finalist for the 2017 Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the 2016 Texas Observer Story Prize, the 2020 QuietMan Flash Fiction Prize, and the Blood Orange Review Fiction Prize. She is a member of the 2022 Futurescapes Writers Workshop. She has fiction forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine.

Her short story collection Krackle’s Last Movie was long-listed for YesYes Book’s Fiction Open and was a Finalist for the 2024 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Under it’s previous title, Curious Monsters, it was the runner-Up for the 2018 Madeline P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize. The collection is still available for publication.

Her flash fiction chapbook Only Animals will be published in 2024 by Wrong Publishing.

PLAYWRITING

Chelsea was a 2018 Sewanee Writers Conference Playwright Fellow and a Humanitas PlayLA award winner, and her plays have been finalists for the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, PlayPenn Conference, Woodward/Newman Drama Award, Reva Shiner Comedy Award, the Ingram New Works Lab, the UNIMA Young Writers Award, the Stanley Drama Award, and a semi-finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Seven Devils Conference. Her play Wood Boy Dog Fish, written with and produced by Rogue Artists Ensemble, received its second production in the inaugural season at the Garry Marshall Theatre in 2018. She co-wrote with Lisa Sanaye Dring the acclaimed Ovation Award-wining immersive horror theatre production Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin, also with RAE, which took over a 6-story warehouse. Her postal play/interactive fiction piece Spite & Malice premiered with Post Theatrical in March 2020 under her new story series Slipped Beyond Stories. She co-wrote the immersive pastoral site-specific play Señor Plummer’s Final Fiesta with Rogue Artists Ensemble in collaboration with West Hollywood. Her plays have been workshopped and developed with Skylight Theatre Company, Chalk Reperatory, PlaygroundLA, Theatricum Botanicum, Rogue Artists Ensemble, The Road Theatre Company, The Blank Theatre Company, Playwright’s Arena, The Production Company, Coffee and Whiskey Productions (Chicago), Wordsymth Theatre (Houston), The Eclectic Company Theatre, UCSB Department of Theatre, and Brimmer Street Theatre Company. She was a member of the Orchard Project’s 2020 Liveness Lab and CultureHub’s 2022 Writing for Electronic Formats Workshop with Erik Ehn.

She’s currently writing new plays with Moving Arts’s MADLab and The Road’s Under Construction writers groups.

SCREENWRITING

Chelsea co-wrote Welcome to the Blumhouse Live, an interactive murder mystery film event for Blumhouse/Amazon Prime by Little Cinema, which was nominated for a 2021 Emmy for Outstanding Interactive Program. She co-wrote Cartoonio’s Birthday Bash, the interactive film event for HBO, and The Alienist: Who Killed Alejandro Valdez, the interactive film event for TNT, both also by Little Cinema. Her short film script And She Kept Walking was a semi-finalist for the SHIFT Creative Fund. She co-wrote the short film The Long Way, directed by Michele Santoro, which is currently on the film festival circuit. Most recently she co-wrote with Lisa Sanaye Dring the immersive ghost story narrative app for iOS and Android, Kaidan Project: Alone, produced by Rogue Artists Ensemble. She is currently co-writing the feature film D is for Dog, based on the stage play.

Directing

Chelsea most recently directed three iterations of the Welcome to Meadowlark Falls immersive holiday event, including the in-person The Cookie Contest in 2019 and the postal-plays Christmas At Home and The Very Merry Christmas Contest. She directed the one woman show Fifty Shades of Melania, which toured to the New York Fringe Festival in 2019. Most recently she co-directed and devised the immersive pop-up haunt This Alley Is Haunted as part of the Kaidan Project: Alone app launch. Other theatrical plays and experiences include the world premieres of Low Tech by Jeff Folschinsky, 99 Impossible Things (writer/director), The X-Mas Cabaret (writer/director), Traveling Carnival Freakshow (writer/director), Sally Spector the Musical by David Johnson (Hurricane Season), The Bad Habit by Constance Humphrey Egan, the One Day Play, and The Theory of Silence (co-writer/director), and the monologue shows All Over Again, Signs from the Universe, and We’re No Heroes. Her assistant director credits include Preposterous and Turkey Day at the Eclectic Company Theatre (dir. Taylor Ashbrook) and Bunny Bunny at the Falcon Theatre (dir. Dimitri Toscas). She has directed numerous readings and small events for Eclectic Voices, the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, The Vagrancy’s Young Playwrights Award, the Garry Marshall Theatre New Works Festival, and Rogue Artists Ensemble.

She is the Associate Artistic Director of Rogue Artists Ensemble and the co-founder and co-director of the Rogue Lab New Play Incubator. She holds an MFA from UC Riverside in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts.