Sabrina Zanello Jackson (she/her/ella) is a dramaturg, director, community organizer, and recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University (Dramaturgy '22). Her work uses storytelling to identify cycles of history, imagine transformative civic engagement, and practice collective healing.

As a dramaturg, she supports the development of bold new plays, musicals, adaptations, and transmedia works. She is most drawn to stories that exist to resist; stories of liberation and joy that are unafraid to break Aristotelian structure, engage queer and disability aesthetics, or challenge spectatorship. Her recent dramaturgy work at CMU includes Power/Trip by Anne Cecelia DeMelo, My H8 Letter 2 the Gr8 American Theatre by Diana Oh, and Birds and Beansprouts by Joe Young. She’s also a sci-fi nerd who believes virtual theatre is here to stay. Recent virtual productions include Theatre: A Love Story (Assistant Producer, National Women’s Theatre Festival), a day (Dramaturg, CMU), and Cloudbanks (Director, New Works Coffeehouse). Her paper on interactive cinema, “The Awful Power to Punish”, was published in LURe Journal in October 2021.

As a community organizer, Sabrina is passionate about consent-based practices, reimagining safety, and dismantling access barriers. To support this, she is taking time to deepen her understanding of consent work, radical hospitality, archivism, Transformative Justice, Disability Justice, the non-profit industrial complex, and post-carbon futures. She spent the summer of 2022 conducting archival research on the history of campus policing and sexual violence at Carnegie Mellon. She is currently serving as the Education and Community Engagement Apprentice at Olney Theatre Center.

In her “free time”, she enjoys nature walks, alfajores, and research rabbit-holes. To learn more, please visit her website: www.sabrinazanellojackson.art