CURRENTLY
This winter, I’m not exactly hibernating, but I’m spending most of my time at my desk or in the studio working on developing collaborative projects with long-time colleagues like Asher Hartman’s Gawdafful National Theater, Rosanna Gamson’s RGWW and director Sara Lyons, and with new collaborators like Paul Donald, Sharon Udoh and Dudley Saunders.
I’m a founding member of the LA LGBTQ+ Arts & Culture Coalition, a network of artists, organizers and cultural institutions created in 2025 and 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.
Available for booking: my 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 my reading The Place in Which I’ll Fit Will Not Exist Until I Make It (see below). For info about booking, click here.
Since 2020, I’ve been a Lincoln City Fellow, sponsored by the Speranza Foundation (logo above, center).
RECAP
In October 2025, I was an artist-in-residence at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY. During the four-week residency, I worked on several projects, including the development of 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.
In June 2025, Los Angeles Performance Practice invited me to create a short piece for the first evening of their spring MicroFest, which I performed on the evening of my 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.”
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disruption began, with the performing arts sector hard hit by shutdowns and losses, and revenue and audiences still lagging significantly today from pre-pandemic levels, even as other sectors of the County’s creative economy recover. In 2023, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture 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, provided 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).
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 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 of 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.
The following year, to conclude 2024’s Pride Month activities, One Institute invited me back for an encore presentation.