Bio.

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

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

As a playwright, 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 has developed new plays with Moving Arts’ MADlab, Skylight Theatre Company, MADLab (Ohio), Kayenta Performing Arts Center, The Vagrancy, The Road, Chalk Repertory, PlaygroundLA, Echo Theatre Company, the Ignite Project with EST/LA and the Boston Court, among others.

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, and she was recently featured in the first season of It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton. Her first flash fiction chapbook Only Animals is now available through Wrong Publishing, and her first novella, Krackle’s Last Movie, is forthcoming February 2026 from Split/Lip Press. Her collection-in-progress was a Finalist for Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, a runner-Up for the Madeline P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize, and long-listed for the Santa Fe Writers Project.

She has been a resident artist at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, Stoveworks, Yefe Nof, and Prospect Street Writers House, and has received grants from the City of Burbank and the LA Department of Cultural Affairs.

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, as well as interactive and digital projects for HBO and Disney.

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 has also directed immersive stunt projects for MGM+ and New Line Cinema.

Chelsea holds a BA in Creative Studies from UC Santa Barbara and an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from UC Riverside. She is currently Interim Artistic Director at Rogue Artists Ensemble and the Associate Editor of The Cosmic Background.