Bio.

Chelsea Sutton is a writer and theatre maker of what she likes to call gothic whimsy.

She’s a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a Humanitas PlayLA award-winner, a 2015 O’Neill Conference Finalist, a 2018 Sewanee Writers Conference Playwright Fellow, and a graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. 

The second production of her macabre steampunk adaptation of Pinocchio, Wood Boy Dog Fish (created with Rogue Artists Ensemble) was nominated for five Ovation Awards and five Stage Raw Awards and appeared in the inaugural season at the Garry Marshall Theatre. Her play The Abundance, written in Moving Arts’ 2023 MADlab, was a semi-finalist for the O’Neill Conference and was recently developed at the 2024 Valdez Theatre Conference Play Lab and the 2024 Kayenta New Works Lab.  Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin, a piece she co-wrote with Lisa Sanaye Dring, was nominated for 8 Ovation Awards including Best Production (winner of 5). She co-wrote the Emmy-nominated 2020 Welcome to the Blumhouse Live, an interactive film event for Blumhouse/Amazon and The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, an award-winning virtual event for TNT + Little Cinema Digital. 

Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, CRAFT Literary, Bourbon Penn, Orca Literary, Flash Fiction Online, Flash Frog, Bullshit Lit and the anthology Mooncalves: Strange Stories, among others. Her first flash fiction chapbook Only Animals is now available through Wrong Publishing, and her first novella is forthcoming February 2026 from Split/Lip Press.

Chelsea is an alum of Moving Arts’ MADlab, Skylight Theatre Company’s Lab Works, The Vagrancy Playwrights Group, The Road’s Under Construction Playwright’s Group, Chalk Repertory’s Playwrights Group, PlaygroundLA, Echo Theatre Company’s Playwrights’ Group and the Ignite Project with EST/LA. She is currently developing her play The Abundance in the Boston Court Playwrights’ Group Theatre in 2024/2025.

As a director specializing in new work, she has helmed the development or production of over twenty new plays, most recently three installments of an immersive holiday show, Welcome to Meadowlark Falls, which was nominated for a 2022 No Proscenium Audience Choice Award, and the solo show Fifty Shades of Melania, which toured to the New York Fringe Festival in 2019. She is currently co-creating/directing/writing an original horror holiday podcast, Long Winter Nights.

She holds a BA in Creative Studies from UC Santa Barbara and an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. She is currently an Ensemble Member at Rogue Artists Ensemble and the Associate Editor of The Cosmic Background.