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Sabrina (she/her) uses art to identify cycles of history, imagine transformative civic engagement, and practice collective healing.

With double the last names for double the fun, Sabrina Zanello Jackson is an Argentinian-American dramaturg, director, producer, organizer, educator, and freelance book editor. (Carnegie Mellon Dramaturgy 2022)

bio

A headshot of a white Latina woman with a dyed strawberry blonde pixie cut and cheeky crooked nose, looking into the camera with a big smile. She wears a glittering brown paisley blazer over a black shirt, a gold heart necklace, and faded gold dangling earrings.

As a story consultant, Sabrina helps develop bold new plays, musicals, adaptations, transmedia works, and books. Her recent dramaturgy work includes Power/Trip by Anne Cecelia DeMelo, My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre by Diana Oh, and Birds and Beansprouts by Joe Young. She recently edited the young-adult fantasy novel, Life Amongst the Giants. She served as the education and engagement apprentice for Olney Theatre Center's 2022-23 season and finds joy evaluating scripts for the San Diego Latinx New Play Festival.

 

She’s also a spec-fic 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.

Photo by Louis Stein

As a community organizer, Sabrina is passionate about consent-based practices, reimagining safety, and dismantling access barriers. She spent the summer of 2022 conducting archival research on the history of campus policing and sexual violence at Carnegie Mellon. She is a member of LMDA and Open Circle Theatre's Hive Collective.

 

In her “free time”, she enjoys nature walks, alfajores, and research rabbit-holes.

4 photos of Sabrina's head, making different faces. When you hover over, the heads switch positions.
Image Description: Four photos of the top half of Sabrina's face side by side, as if they are one image. One face raises an eyebrow at the camera, one looks up, one gives a suspicious side-eye, and one stares wide-eyed at the camera in alarm. When you hover over the image, the faces switch positions.

artistic statement

I’m a Spanglish-speaking dramaturg, director, editor, producer, and community organizer passionate about bridging the gap between artists and audiences. My work uses art to identify cycles of history, imagine transformative civic engagement, and practice collective healing.

artistic statement
On stage, 3 women with their right palm raised as if taking an oath, looking out with concern.
Gif: Women in colorful dresses frantically dancing in a studio lit pink and blue. Think Pina Bausch.

As a dramaturg, I support the development of bold new plays, musicals, adaptations, bilingual and transmedia works. I am 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. Playwrights who inspire me include Lily Padilla, Ntozake Shange, Daniella de Jesús, lily gonzales, Guillermo Calderón, and Julia Izumi.

A lit shadow screen stands out against a darkened living room bathed in dark blue, shimmery light.

I dream of a world where trust comes from love comes from responsibility. As a community organizer, I am passionate about dismantling access barriers to the arts and promoting true inclusion (which often means centering the most marginalized) in artistic leadership, creative teams, and audience outreach. To support this, I’m taking time to deepen my understanding of consent work, radical hospitality, archivism, Transformative Justice, Disability Justice, the nonprofit industrial complex, and post-carbon futures.

Bathed in red stage light, 2 women kneel, grasping each other. One stares fearfully at the other.

I believe in theatre that reproduces healing rather than harm. Poet Roger Reeves explains that there is perverse voyeurism in depicting violence in art and doing so without care inadvertently reproduces that violence for the viewers. The act of looking is extremely powerful. Playwrights who inform my views on spectatorship (in content and form!) include Jackie Sibblies Drury, Jennifer Haley, and María Irene Fornés.

Woman sings at music stands, backed by a string quartet. The writer's silhouette watches front row.

other beliefs THAT i hold close:

  • I know the least I will know for the rest of my life!

  • Libraries are radical spaces

  • We speak in poetry, not prose!

  • The body is not an apology

  • History is inherently fictionalized

  • “We ‘should’ others as a defense mechanism.” - Mara Nelson-Greenberg

  • The work... is... slow...

  • “If it isn’t healing, it isn’t justice.” - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

  • Weird is good :)

  • I’m way sillier in real life I promise

Blob-shaped collage of a woman's profile with hair made of a rainbow of cancer cells and viruses.
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