Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 18, 7:30PM

Keioui Keijaun Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials addressing blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Thomas earned her Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has shown work nationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and internationally Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.

Body Garden
VORTEX Tent, Feb 18, 9:00PM

Bird of Paradigm is a musician, visual artist, and absurdist who's passionate about sensual earthly splendor. Her practice spans color pencil drawing, experimental video, animation, electronic music, and creative writing. She values improvisation and intuition in her art and places the melancholic catharsis expressed in her mixed media audio/visual performances within a practice of cultural grief ritual.

DISPHORI∀
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 19, 6:30PM

Ari Miss Perkances uses their body in a transgressive manner. A crucial part of the rite in its modality, as the artist understands it, unfolds through sadomasochistic practices and employs piercing, tattooing, bloodletting, and mutilation to create rituals of redemption and inner journey across multiple phases of bodily exploration.

It is about transcending physical pain. The artist expresses an attempt not only to exorcise their suffering, but also to surpass the limits of their own resistance through artistic expression. In doing so, they seek to demonstrate that only through the catharsis of performance and ritual is it possible to escape the obstacles imposed by the tyranny of gender, family, religion, and society upon the human being.

Blue Lightning Ghost Train:
Inpatient Program 1
VORTEX Tent, Feb 19, 8:00PM

Kerosene Jones is a writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and archival necromancy. Utilizing unorthodox compositional techniques and experimental research procedures, Jones endeavors to provide both sonic and ceremonial sanctuary for hungry ghosts with unfinished business. His work across mediums has been featured and supported by Art Omi, BBC Radio 4, Black Mountain College Museum, CPR - Center For Performance Research, MoMA PS1, Montez Press Radio, NYSCA, Wave Farm, The Poetry Project, Visual AIDS, and Onassis USA. His arts & culture writing has been published by BOMB, Interview Magazine, Document Journal, X-TRA, Screen Slate, MUBI Notebook, The Brooklyn Rail, The Kitchen Magazine, and LAMBDA Literary. From 2016-2021 he was a founding member of the Ridgewood-based poetry and performance collective The Anchoress Syndicate, and in 2022 the host of the podcast “Pure Garbage: An Oral Examination of John Waters.” He is the Programs Manager at CPR - Center for Performance Research, and the Arts Editor of WUSSY Magazine, a queer arts & culture organization and biannual print publication based in Atlanta, GA. He recently completed an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media at Brooklyn College.

Legacy Award
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 19, 9:00PM

Alice Bag is a singer/songwriter, musician, author, artist, educator and feminist. Alice was the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first bands to form during the initial wave of punk in Los Angeles. The Alice Bag Band was featured in the seminal documentary on punk rock, The Decline of Western Civilization. Alice went on to perform in other groundbreaking bands, including Castration Squad, Cholita, and Las Tres. She is the author of the critically acclaimed books Violence Girl and Pipe Bomb For the Soul.  Her self-titled 2016 debut album received critical acclaim and was named one of the best albums of 2016 by AllMusic. Her second album, Blueprint, was named one of the Best Albums of 2018 by NPR and the Los Angeles Times. Bag’s 3rd album, Sister Dynamite, was released in April 2020 on In The Red Records during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Alice has recently joined forces with Kid Congo Powers for a new act called Juanita and Juan, with a new EP on In The Red Records debuting in Spring 2025.

The Death Spa Experience
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 20, 3:30PM

Macon Reed works in sculpture, video, painting, and social practice and is based in New Orleans. They primarily create large installations and facilitate extensive public programming inside of them, drawing from from time in queer, punk, and DIY communities that experiment with alternative models of culture-making and power-sharing.

How to Carry Water
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 20, 3:30PM

Sasha Wortzel is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist exploring how past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Her first feature documentary RIVER OF GRASS (2025) premiered at True/False and won IDA's Pare Lorentz Award, the Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs, and the Audience Award at Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others.

metateando
VORTEX Tent, Feb 20, 5:30PM

Luna Vela is a Mexico-born, Texas-raised artist, chef, and anthropologist whose practice lives in the liminal space between nourishment and ritual. Rooted in ancestral memory, tejana fantasies, and queer futurity, her work explores labor, gender, and the intersections of food and art.

3 scenes from queer utopia
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 20, 6:45PM

Andie Flores is a doctoral candidate and performance artist who plays with embarrassment and failure. For better or for worse, she continues to renew her commitment to doing the work of the absurd.

Sam Mayer is a playwright and performance maker from Houston. He is the recipient of the Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation Prize.

Grant Gilker is an artist and a recent graduate at the University of Texas and Plan II and playwriting/directing. They are currently co-producing and curating the Mi Casa Es Su Teatro with Frontera Fest and will also be performing in Fusebox this spring in season six of Sam Meyer’s poolboy.

Ayesha Hughes (she/they) is a Texan native theater actor, clown, puppeteer, and Montessori teacher. Their previous work includes Tongue Play and House Play produced by the Broccoli project, “Remember” - an interactive children’s theater experience produced at UT, and impersonating Jojo Siwa in a Bronx basement.

La Playita
VORTEX Tent, Feb 20, 8:00PM

Pó Rodil, is a trans artist from Puerto Rico. Their practice moves between body practices, exploring gender, embodiment, and queer futures. Through performance, poetry, and visual creations his work centers the liberation of dissident bodies and identities, and the poetics of the colonized body. Creating space for tenderness, pleasure, and political imagination.

Early Career Retrospective 
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 20, 9:00PM

Young Joon Kwak is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice moves between sculpture, performance, and collective action. Kwak develops material processes that extend performance into sculptural afterlives, generating forms through touch, proximity, and shared labor rather than representation. Kwak produces invert-cast impressions in resin, metal, dirt, glitter, mirrored glass, and iridescent crystals that function through optical instability and reflection—inviting durational, embodied encounters rather than legibility. Collaboration is a structural condition of Kwak’s practice: they founded Mutant Salon in 2012, a queer-trans-BIPOC collective beauty salon and performance platform, and have performed in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurnersince 2011.

Their work has been exhibited internationally, including in the Whitney Biennial 2026, Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, and recent solo exhibitions at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2025), and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2024). Honors include the Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant, Artadia Los Angeles Award, California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, and the Korean Arts Foundation of America Artist Award. Their work is held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Dallas Museum of Art, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and others.

WAKE (film screening)
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 21, 3:00PM

Jay Carlon is a queer dance artist, choreographer and community organizer whose work is grounded in a collective journey toward decolonization and sustainability. His work facilitates shared healing and the exploration of post-colonial identity, ancestry, and the complex queer and Filipinx experience in relationship to site and space. Carlon connects a global network of Filipinx creatives, organizing communities around art and food.

Carlon’s work along the West Coast engages Filipino enclaves around shared experience; through the Filipino American National Historical Society on the Central Coast, and in Los Angeles at REDCAT NOW Festival, homeLA, The Broad Museum, the Japanese American National Museum, and more, along with performances with Makini, Miguel Gutierrez, The Industry Opera, and Oguri. In New York, they have presented work at 92NY and The CURRENT SESSIONS, and performed with the Metropolitan Opera and Bill T. Jones. Carlon also researches and develops work internationally and in his ancestral family’s home in Bohol, Philippines.

Carlon is a recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Choreographer Grant, New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Production Grant, California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship, and named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch.”

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Filipino-American composer and sound artist Micaela Tobin wields her soprano voice against the confines of convention, specializing in experimental and contemporary realms of opera and noise. Integrating voice with electronics, ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism, she weaves dynamic music that is at once alluring and demanding. 

With her primary project, White Boy Scream, Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through hardware, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and choral sound-walls. Her most recent full length album, BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc), includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth, and ancestral memory. 

As a composer and director, Micaela presented her cinematic debut at REDCAT in May 2021, titled “BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons,” as an adaptation of the synonymous album. Continuing her series incorporating the precolonial mythology of the Philippines, Micaela premiered her second opera in July 2023, “APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth,” at the historic Zorthian Ranch in Altadena, CA.

Micaela is the recipient of the 2021 MAP Fund, the 2022 NPN Creation & Development Fund, and is currently based in Tulsa, OK as an awardee of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

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Sydney Cohen, aka Hey Aswang, styles in the fray—where experimental fashion and music flirt with care and communication. Reclaiming the aswang, the shape-shifting Filipino folk creature, she turns the “monstrous” into sources of power and play by weaving storytelling with people who like to push boundaries and practice radical transformation. Through her work with rebel Filipiniana brand Vinta Gallery, she bridges diasporic worlds, including collaborating on costumes and styling for WAKE (Jay Carlon) and APOLAKI (Micaela Tobin).

BASECK - HYPED ON EXPERIENCE
VORTEX Tent, Feb 21, 4:45PM

Derrick Estrada, known professionally as Baseck, is a Mexican-American sound artist, performer, and instrument designer with 30+ years in electronic music. Raised in Chicano culture in Lancaster, CA, he found liberation through sound at age 12 via L.A.’s underground rave scene. His practice merges live performance, experimental synthesis, fashion, and hardware innovation.

Baseck has designed original synth modules with Noise Engineering (Variatic Basicus), Malekko (Voltage Block), and Steady State Fate/BII Electronics (Triptych). He’s performed at festivals including Moogfest, Boiler Room, and Synthposium, and collaborated with Genesis P-Orridge, Alessandro Cortini (NIN), Caterina Barbieri, and Charli XCX. His label/event series Hyped On Experience supports underground artists through sound, DIY culture, and wearable design.

As an educator, he’s led workshops at CalArts, Moogfest, and Synth Library. Now based in Tulsa, OK, his work centers joy, improvisation, and vibration as tools for healing and sonic freedom.

Prayer Pillow
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 21, 5:45PM

NEMATOCYST (Los Angeles) is a live collaboration between performance artist/choreographer Jas Lin and writer/producer/DJ Hearthealer. Their transportive hybrid performances birth unique creature characters who roam through lush sonic dreamscapes. Inviting their audiences to cohabit their immersive worlds, NEMATOCYST harnesses the collective altered state of performance to conjure embodied connection and transformation.

Their performances have carved immersive habitats across international venues including Creamcake’s 3hd Festival (Berlin), Hong Kong Art Week, OIL (Shenzhen), Orbitware (Bali), Bussy Temple (Singapore), Cakeshop (Seoul), Shapeshifter (Bangkok), Eaton’s Consciousness Festival (Hong Kong), Red Room (Yangon), and more.

Named after the stinging cells of jellyfish and other cnidarians, NEMATOCYST is a venomous injection of aliveness– a portal into another way of being.

Xina Xurner (live set)
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 21, 9:00PM

Xina Xurner is a Los Angeles–based sadical and sexperimental music and performance duo formed in 2011 by vocalist and multidisciplinary performance artist–and OUTsider 2026 Early Career Retrospective honoree–Young Joon Kwak, and producer and musician Marvin Astorga. Fusing industrial noise, power electronics, dark club-wrecking beats, ecstatic dancing, and extreme vocal distortion, Xina Xurner’s high-intensity live performances unleash an immersive sonic onslaught of queer trans-femme power. 

Xina Xurner has released multiple albums, including DIE (2012), Queens of the Night (2018), and the forthcoming XXX: Lower Calling (2026). Xina Xurner performs internationally across underground venues, festivals, and music and performance art institutions, while expanding their reach across live performance, sound, video, art installations, and ongoing collaborations.

NANTLI
VORTEX Theater, Feb 22, 2:30PM

Ari is a multidisciplinary Indigenous artist (Guachichil, Chichimeca) based in Austin, Texas, whose work explores memory, ancestry, ritual, and embodied storytelling through poetry, photography, design, and performance. Rooted in reclamation, their practice weaves personal and collective histories into immersive, evocative experiences.

NANTLI is an immersive performance weaving poetry, photography, and movement into a love story for our Earth, our Mothers, and the spirits who guide us.

In a feminine Indigenous body navigating a world once again at the edge of collapse, the piece asks: ¿Qué es ser, vivir en un cuerpo Indígena?

Swine
VORTEX Theater, Feb 22, 2:30PM

Notre Dom is a drag artist and multimedia performer rooted in queer South Texas identity. His work blends performance, video, and sound to interrogate masculinity, cultural memory, and embodied resistance through cathartic spectacle.

Swine is a visceral drag performance that collides queer South Texas identity, familial ritual, and machismo through camp, horror, and spectacle. It makes meat of the self, not to be consumed, but to reclaim control.

Angel in Disguise
VORTEX Theater, Feb 22, 2:30PM

Sir Beauregard Elliot, Esquire is a multifaceted performance artist that specializes in telling stories through music. This will be his first performance after having top surgery so he’s very emotional about it.

I take a look at myself in the mirror. I shed all the layers of clothing to express the angel underneath the layers, the trans person, the Black person, the fat person. The Angel in Disguise.

Body as personality
VORTEX Theater, Feb 22, 2:30PM

Katie “KD” Drackert is a Disabled Sapphic focused on advocacy, organizing, public speaking, and creating art in Austin, Texas. Upon witnessing the government reduce access to critical public health information regarding airborne pathogens such as Covid, while simultaneously navigating the worsening of her disabilities due to Long Covid, KD founded Clear the Air ATX, an organization dedicated to providing access to free HEPA purifiers and community education to reduce the spread of airborne pathogens and impacts of post-viral illnesses.

the Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars
VORTEX Courtyard , Feb 22, 4:30PM

Javier Robelo (he/him) is a Nicaraguan visual artist making prints, sculptures, and performances to excavate and celebrate queer feeling. 

Leo Briggs (he/him) is a dance-maker and performer who lives in Austin, Texas. He teaches ballet at Austin Community College.

Additional performers: venese alcantar, leo briggs, sofie cardinal, tommy heath, sam mendelbaum, aída reyes, javier robelo, micah senter, joshua winn

Hands That Steal from "Other" Mouths
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 22, 5:45PM

Temitope Olujobi is a Queer Nigerian-American Architect turned Game Designer making games in the creases of all types of odd and completely cracked combinations. Temi began their indulgence into all things 3D combining their love of architectural design and roleplaying, making freakishly delightful virtual dwellings for some very extravagant gamers in the Second Life modification community. Since then, Temi has used their design practice to feed their insatiable curiosity about the connection between two seemingly very disparate parts. What happens when you combine human shit with a windmill? Restorative Justice with a holodeck? An anthropomorphic hand and mouth with the dreamy visual triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch? These are all questions Temi has attempted to answer with their digital art and video games in some uncanny ways.

there are no words, so may it be the end
VORTEX Tent, Feb 22, 7:15PM

Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. They are a cultural worker, organizer, and educator dedicated to disrupting cycles of systemic, interpersonal, and internalized violence., and wield their art in service of the liberation of Palestine. A graduate of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ EmergeNYC, former Jerome Foundation AIRspace Resident, and MacDowell Colony Fellow. They exist in two places at once.

introspective exhibition
VORTEX Theatre, Feb 22, 8:30PM

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body in its variations to make visible the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh.

Cowboi Shine Service
Artist Brunch, Feb 22, 11:00AM

Leather (& faux leather) cleaning & conditioning service.

Body of Mine
Pony Shed, Ongoing

Body of Mine is an award-winning, full-body VR experience that invites you to inhabit the body of another gender and discover stories from transgender individuals.Combining body, face, and eye tracking with personal interviews of transgender individuals, the experimental storytelling experience allows you to hear, discover, and experience stories of gender dysphoria and euphoria.

Cameron Kostopoulos is an award-winning immersive creator. Their breakthrough debut VR experience “Body of Mine” was the recipient of the Producers Guild Innovation Award, and won prizes at SXSW, BAFTA, Games for Change and more. They are the Founder & CEO of Kost, a storytelling collective aimed at helping us better understand ourselves, the world around us, and our fellow human beings. Cameron has a BFA in Film & TV Production from USC's School of Cinematic Arts and an MA from ASU’s Narrative & Emerging Media Program under the mentorship of Nonny de la Peña.

Bunny Cage
Butterfly Bar, Ongoing

Dust Bunny (b.1999, El Paso, TX) is a practicing multi-disciplinary artist from Austin, TX, and received their BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in New Media from the University of North Texas. Their work explores and expands upon their intersectional identity as a 1st generation, queer, Filipino-American through digital approaches, sculpture, photography, and drag. Guided by themes of synthetic beauty, ocularcentrism, self-mythologization, transformation, and digital interdimensionality, Dust Bunny highlights the significance of inner and collective plurality; calling viewers to reframe and look carefully upon the construct of identity, not as a fixed truth, but as something embracingly unstable, malleable, self-authored, erotic, and beautiful.

The Garden Remembers
Butterfly Bar, Ongoing

Via Madison Ceaser is a multi-hyphenate artist whose work centers Black and Brown people, seeking to capture the subtle nuances of intersectional identities. Her practice emerges from lived experience, reflecting on the ongoing process of navigating identity and the ritual-based ways she connects with her cultural heritage, the land she inhabits, and her inner self.

Ceaser earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a minor in Digital Media from the University of Texas at Austin. During her studies, she was influenced by a range of artists, including Dawoud Bey, Simone Leigh, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and Mickalene Thomas; each shaping her approach to representation, material, and storytelling. In addition she draws from her parents' hometowns, Beaumont and Seagraves, Texas, tracing the fading threads of memory, the pull of the land, and the intertwined stories of generations. Through this search, she aims to find connections between her own life and the lives of those who came before her.