WHAT’S HAPPENING
October 2025: Paul is currently an artist-in-residence at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY. During the four-week residency, Paul is working on the full-length script of a new play, WALL BERLINER, WAHLBERLINER, an early version of which was read at Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in 2023.
June 2025: Los Angeles Performance Practice invited Paul to create a short piece for the first evening of their spring MicroFest, which he performed on the evening of his return from eight weeks abroad, right after 27 hours of travel from Berlin to Los Angeles via Istanbul.Welcome Back, the central themes of which were border crossing during the current US administration and alienation at home and abroad, felt like a strange combination of a standup comedy set, a TED Talk and sleepwalking. Curator and art critic/historian Amelia Jones, who attended the festival, wrote: “Paul Outlaw is the consummate performer—[Welcome Back is] an elegant, funny, acerbic meditation on the terrifying border politics we live with as we live within or return to the USA.”
Paul is a founding member of the LA LGBTQ+ Arts & Culture Coalition, a network of artists, organizers and cultural institutions committed to uplifting LGBTQ+ voices and countering political, cultural, and institutional attacks on our communities. We advance coordinated advocacy, resource sharing and collective power building across the cultural sector. The coalition’s first covening was held at the Los Angeles LGBT Center in July 2025.
Available for booking: Paul’s experimental one-person play BBC (Big Black Cockroach), which premiered at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) in Los Angeles in June 2024, and Paul’s reading The Place in Which I’ll Fit Will Not Exist Until I Make It (see below). For info about booking, click here.
WHAT HAPPENED?
PAUL OUTLAW & BBC (BIG BLACK COCKROACH) AMONG 40 RECIPIENTS OF LA COUNTY PERFORMING ARTS RECOVERY GRANTS
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic disruption began, with the performing arts sector hard hit by shutdowns, losses, and revenue and audiences still lagging significantly today from pre-pandemic levels, even as other sectors of the County’s creative economy are recovering. In 2023, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture has announced 40 awards—totaling $1.2 million—to performing arts organizations, individual artists and producers of new or existing artistic work, including dance, music, theater, and folk and traditional arts. This one-time program, the LA County Performing Arts Recovery Grant, provides support to the sector with funding from the former Ford Theatre Foundation, administered by the Center for Cultural Innovation on behalf of the Department of Arts and Culture.
This award provided funding for the creation, documentation, and presentation of the evening-length version of BBC (Big Black Cockroach).
DUET is a new devised performance work exploring boyhood, maturity and mortality through storytelling, movement, masks and audiovisual media.
Original text, dramaturgy and images: Paul Outlaw & Joe Seely
Mask design and construction: Joe Seely
Media editing: Paul Outlaw
Work-in-progress presentations:
”WALKING TO THE EDGE“
Lincoln City Fellowship '24 Artist Showcase
Friday, November 8, 2024
Clifton's Republic, 648 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA
ARTIST RESIDENCY SERIES OPEN STUDIO EVENT
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Davidson/Valentini Theatre, LA LGBT Center, 1125 North McCadden Place, Los Angeles, CA
To conclude 2024’s Pride Month activities, One Institute invited Paul for an encore presentation of The Place in Which I’ll Fit Will Not Exist Until I Make It, originally unveiled at the inaugural Circa: Queer Histories Festival in 2023 (see below).
Paul joined director Nancy Keystone and ensemble for the Minneapolis premiere of Critical Mass Performance Group’s current project Mariology, which explores the Virgin Mary as a source of faith and comfort—especially in these harrowing times—and as a weapon of control and colonization. In a mythical fifth grade classroom, indoctrination gives way to fantasy and rebellion, in a rambunctious spectacle of live music, movement and text. Mariology disrupts ingrained knowledge and inspires imagination about Mary’s roles in systems of gender, power and faith, in order to open possibilities for personal liberation and agency.
Mariology opened the 47th season of Mixed Blood Theatre, with three weeks of performances in October and November 2023.
Celebrating over 70 years of service to the LGBTQ+ community, One Institute presented Circa, the first and only LGBTQ+ histories festival in the United States. During October 2023 (LGBT History Month), the festival was presented at various venues throughout Los Angeles. On October 3, Circa welcomed Paul’s The Place in Which I’ll Fit Will Not Exist Until I Make It: Eight Black Voices from the Eight Decades of One Institute, a reading featuring excerpts from writings by and interviews with queer African American luminaries from the 1950s to the 2020s. Their words serve not only as snapshots of queer culture in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, but also as a timeline of our triumphs and challenges.
Tuesday, October 3, 2023 | Advocate & Gochis Galleries at the Los Angeles LGBT Center | 1225 N McCadden Place, Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles Performance Project’s ACCELERATOR builds a community of independent artists that are actively seeking to resource and develop a current project. The cohort meets monthly to deepen their producing resources through guest speakers and engaging with our knowledgeable staff. ACCELERATOR serves as an accountability framework to aim for ten firm proposals or actions towards developing & resourcing each participant’s work.
Invited participants will have a demonstrated commitment to longevity in contemporary performance, be based in Los Angeles, and actively working towards developing a specific performance project.
2023 ACCELERATOR artists: Daniel Corral, Alison De La Cruz (not pictured), Marsian De Lellis, DaEun Jung (not pictured), Daria Kaufman, Mireya Lucio, Paul Outlaw, Nina Sarnelle (not pictured), Selwa Sweidan (not pictured), Anu Yadav (not pictured), Chelsea Zeffiro.
Since 2020, Paul has been a Lincoln City Fellow, sponsored by the Speranza Foundation.