Bio:

Sofia Osborne (she/they) is Director and Actor using their work in both mediums to fuel and inform the other. Sofia began directing in high school to create more opportunities for women onstage in her community, starting with a summer production of 12 Angry Jurors. They fell in love with theater’s unique ability to initiate conversations and social change even on a micro level. Sofia’s next project, a mainstage production of The Laramie Project allowed her to work with many debut actors and empower them in their roles, all while challenging the status quo in the discourse around queerness in her hometown and surrounding areas.

At Carnegie Mellon, Sofia dove into the multidisciplinary training the directors receive for the first two years of the program. Sofia also interned with Francis Ford Coppola the summer after their freshman year as the script supervisor on project “SJ S22.” She was then cast as Jamie in a CMU capstone production of Athena and learned to fence for the role. Sofia was invited to continue taking acting classes at CMU to enhance her directing practice her junior year. She also studied acting from January-July 2023 at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, performing in a production of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin and The Comedy of Error, as well as a self written and directed one-person show titled Horatia’s Understudy. In Wales, they learned the true necessity of failure as a vital tool for growth in training and beyond.

While studying abroad, Sofia and dramaturg Matthew Blankeley collaborated remotely to cut the script for Macbeth to a 90 minute play, create character tracks for an ensemble of 6 actors and begin the design process for the production. Sofia cast only women and non-binary actors in her BFA Directing Capstone production of Macbeth in order to examine the characters and their actions in a world where gender is not a function of society. Sofia worked to empower the actors to own Shakespeare’s language and free themselves through deeply flawed characters.

Sofia aims to explore alternate universes in theater and film that experiment with what the future could be and highlight the inequities and dilemmas of our present. Sofia’s art often plays with time and the politics of actors’ bodies onstage through an embodied rehearsal process rooted in impulse and connection within the ensemble. Sofia has intimately experienced the theater’s ability to provide catharsis, release, and empowerment for its artists and the audience when it can navigate the extremes of human existence onstage in order to make sense of the world offstage.