Sonia Friedman CBE is a British theatre producer for the West End and Broadway. She was born in 1965 to the English concert pianist Clair Llewelyn Friedman (née Sims) and the Russian violinist Leonard Friedman who came from a Russian-Jewish immigrant family.

She trained as a stage manager at the Central School of Speech and Drama and later decided to follow a career as a theatre producer. Between 1988 and 1993, Friedman worked at the National Theatre and in 1993 co-founded the new writing theatre company Out of Joint with Max Stafford-Clark. From 1998, she worked as a producer for the Ambassador Theatre Group. Her own theatre company, Sonia Friedman Productions, was formed in 2002. Many of Friedman’s productions have been nominated and won numerous wards, including Olivier and Tony awards. At the 2014 Olivier Awards, Friedman was the first producer to win awards for Best New Play (Chimerica), Best New Musical (The Book of Mormon), Best Play Revival (Ghosts), and Best Musical Revival (Merrily We Roll Along) in the same year. Her record-breaking production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child won nine Olivier Awards in 2017. In June 2019, Sonia Friedman Productions announced the world premiere of Tom Stoppard‘s new play Leopoldstadt, directed by Patrick Marber, the play premiered at Wyndham’s Theatre in January 2020 and began it’s Broadway debut in September 2022. Leopoldstadt is the sixth collaboration between Sonia Friedman Productions and Tom Stoppard. Friedman announced in 2022, the development of a play (Stranger Things: The First Shadow) with Stephen Daldry, which is set in the same world as Stranger Things (TV series). This show opened for viewing in December 2023.

The Sonia Friedman Production Company produced The Dresser (2015) which was nominated for a BAFTA and the two time BAFTA winning show Wolf Hall (2015). More recently, in 2020, the production company partnered with Angelica Films to produce a re-interpretation of the stage show Uncle Vanya.

Friedman was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2016 for services to theatre. She was awarded Producer of the Year at the Stage Awards for the third year in a row in 2017 and was listed as number one in The Stage 100. In 2018, Sonia Friedman was awarded the Equity Services to Theatre Award at the 18th Annual WhatsOnStage Awards and has been listed on Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2018. In the 2023 New Year Honours, Friedman was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), also for her services to theatre.