Ursula Sturgeon
Dramaturg
2026 BFA Drama, Dramaturgy
Ursula Sturgeon is an all-purpose dramaturg and writer who believes everybody deserves a night at the opera. (She’s been obsessed with opera all her life. Most babies who listened to Mozart turned out perfectly normal. She did not.)
Deeply passionate about old theatre and the operatic world, Sturgeon draws her inspiration from Western classical arts, new age media, and the world around her to create work that toes the line between dramaturgy and observational anthropology. She has worked on productions with Carnegie Mellon’s Schools of Drama and Music, the Opera Festival of Chicago, Spotlight on Opera, and Scotch N’ Soda Student Theatre, where she also served on the Board of Directors. Currently she writes for a variety of publications including but not limited to VAN Music Magazine, Parterre Box, and the Pittsburgh Review of Books. Sturgeon is particularly interested in theatre accessibility and finding new ways to let opera resonate with broader audiences.
She also writes original creative work, featured in Carnegie Mellon’s interdisciplinary journal WOVEN and Scotch N’ Soda Student Theatre. She works in a variety of genres but has a particular knack for adaptation and comic writing, taking particular interest in the 17th and 18th Centuries of theatre.
In her spare time, she likes to draw animals, sew, and (occasionally) speak with the dead.
Work Samples
La Clemenza di Tito
By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Metastasio, and Caterino Mazzola
Directed by Michael McKelvey
Dramaturgy by Ursula Sturgeon
CMU School of Music – 2026
Alcina
By George Frideric Handel and Riccardo Broschi
Directed by Seamus Ricci
Dramaturgy by Ursula Sturgeon
CMU School of Music – 2025
The Unicorn in Captivity
By Ursula Sturgeon
Directed by Bugz Baltzer and Alabaster Richard
Dramaturgy and Original Script by Ursula Sturgeon
Scotch N’ Soda Theatre 2026