Ariella Stoian is a screenwriter, playwright, librettist and narrative designer. Their work sits where science, the wild and wonder meet, creating genre‑blended stories in which the uncanny seeps into the everyday. Drawing on speculative fiction and queer magic realism, they ground the fantastical in human hearts through lyrical, character‑driven storytelling.

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Their writing explores transformation, joyful entanglement and the coexistence of tenderness and violence. It traces family and cross‑generational bonds, queer and trans kinship and love, and our interconnection with ecologies and the more‑than‑human, often through layered time and realities in echoing places.

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Ariella is drawn to stories where loss, magic and small perceptual ruptures reshape how people live together. They explore the knotted costs of care, access and futurity, and the tensions between systems and inner worlds, through wry humour, honesty and playfulness. They are especially interested in formally distinct work where poetics, texture and voice allow the strange to feel intimate and possible.

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Their theatre work includes HIVE, a queer sci‑fi play performed at Assembly Roxy (Edinburgh Fringe, Speakerphone Productions), Camden People’s Theatre and VAULT Festival, originally commissioned by The Space. HIVE was Offie‑nominated for New Writing, longlisted for the BBC Writersroom Popcorn Award, and received four stars from The Scotsman, which described it as a “slick gothic eco‑thriller” with “luminous poetry”. Binge Fringe called it “a new queer eclectic dream of sci‑fi nostalgia”, and other reviewers praised its “highly atmospheric” exploration of grief and displacement.

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Their feature screenplay Life as a Mesoplankton won the Fellini Award for Best International Screenplay at the 2026 BlueCat Screenplay Competition. It was also a finalist for the 2025 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards, placed second in the Shore Scripts Feature Contest, as well as placing in the top 10% of the Academy Nicholl Fellowship.

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Ariella was shortlisted for Theatre503’s International Playwriting Award with To be a bat, which was highly commended by the National Theatre’s New Work Department and longlisted for Paines Plough’s Women’s Playwriting Prize.

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Their interdisciplinary and music‑led work includes LAIKA, a sci‑fi opera created with composer Zygmund de Somogyi, developed through a Junior Fellowship at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and presented in London and Baltimore.

 

Other projects include you wake up/octopus, a live, co‑created interdisciplinary immersive storytelling and composition piece that has toured The Space, Theatre Deli, SPRINT Festival and schools across South East England, and A Quest for Rest, a multidisciplinary interactive narrative commissioned by Theatre Deli and developed at the Young Vic. A Quest for Rest was selected as one of Immersive Rumours’ Best Loved Shows of 2024.

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Ariella was a founding member of Mushmoss Collective, collaborating on interactive narratives, collective storytelling and experimental composition for young people, adults and the inner children of all, including the immersive participatory archive project The Memory Tree. Alongside their writing, they work as a dramaturg, director and deviser, with a particular commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and blended practices.

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They hold an MFA in Writing for Stage & Broadcast Media (Distinction) from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and have developed new writing at Central as a Visiting Practitioner. They have taken part in programmes including the Tall Stories Director’s Scheme, the Without Walls Discovery Programme in Outdoor Arts, and Purple Strings’ Lightning Writes exploring Accessible Dramaturgy and Creative Access.

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Ariella is open to commissions, development opportunities and collaborations across theatre, opera, film, television and interactive or interdisciplinary work.