[A photo of a white non-binary person wearing a long sword earring and shirt with pomegranates.]

Kairos Looney is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and disorganizer. Mainly, they direct, write, and perform plays, teach, design sound, and illustrate. They are drawn to directing projects that are heartfelt, courageous, genre-defying and queer. They teach plays as archives of resistance and theatre as an invariably global emergence. They write plays that are absurdist, earnest, fantastical, speculative, and musical. Often Kairos wants the world to end, and thinks plays can help. Help us start again. 

In New York, they made their off-Broadway debut as a playwright with their biomythographic punk rock concert titled Salt Kid Watches Brooklyn Burn, premiering at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in the 2017 Downtown Urban Arts Festival. House of Telescopes, a transgender fantasia / layer cake of a play that they spent seven years writing, premiered off-Broadway in 2024, produced by Pipeline Theatre. More plays of theirs have ventured off the page, including Radclyffe Hall and the Archivist, a three act colossus on trans exclusionary feminism in the second wave; Show Tom, a one person elegaic epic poem; Creation, a satirization of settler coloniality; and Eel, a docudrama into the obsessive voyeurism of eggs. Skits, scenes, songs, bits, other pieces, have been presented in New York at HERE Arts Center, Dixon Place, Chinatown Soup, DCTV, The Duplex Cabaret Theatre, Theater for the New City, La MaMa Club Theater, 4th Street Theatre, Feinstein's/54 Below, The LGBT Center, Stella Adler Studio, NYU's Cabaret Theatre; in New Orleans at Catapult; in Austin at The Crashbox and Groundfloor Theatre.

Kairos’ directing and playwriting work live in the tradition of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, especially as in theatremaker Liz Swados’ work, who was the first to teach them to write from the interiority of a supposed foe, or as Mz Lz said, ‘from the back door.’ About eight years ago, shortly after Salt Kid’s premiere, Kairos made a decision to move to the South from New York to learn from a long legacy of revolutionary movement organizers.

They draw inspiration from novelist Alice Walker’s imagining of tending petunias as another way to build coalition and practice belonging amongst/for beings denied humanness. Kairos practices, very slowly, a messier, oversaturated, plentiful, and protected concept of belonging (as the organizing adage goes, ‘inch wide mile deep’) with attention to how making plays can be fuel for or against revolution, for or against state narratives, akin to Hegel’s notion of history as an ongoing process of thesis | antithesis | synthesis. You will not find them on social media. Kairos stands on the shoulders of many, many teachers, indebted to footholds, nudges, and hard lessons from those who took a chance on them and saw possibility in them as they fumble(d) toward a greater meaning. 

Kairos is transgender and categorized as white. They employ author James Baldwin’s concept of categorization to stipulate the unreal global racial imaginaries undergirding the very real consequences of global white-body supremacy. They use they/them intentionally as a communication of their gender fluidity, and as a practical attestation to the plurality of all life - i.e. a rejection of the individualization implicit to capitalism. Gender is a colonial fiction.

Teaching and learning are essential to how Kairos approaches being alive. They serve as Adjunct Faculty in the Drama department at Austin Community College. They have been a Guest Artist/Lecturer in courses at University of Michigan, UT Austin, and New York University’s Atlantic and Playwrights Horizons Studios. They have taught in several places, one of which was UT Austin as a lead instructor, where they designed and taught courses in trans performance and history. 

They live on the unceded lands of the Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Comanche and Tonkawa people. In lieu of a personal patreon, if you appreciate Kairos’ work, please consider making a donation to the Indigenous Cultures Institute, as a gesture toward a land tax. 

They are alumnus of Ground Floor Theatre 2023-2024 GFTWrites! residency, Pipeline Theatre 2021-2022 PlayLab, Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice 2021 Graduate Fellowship, Southern Rep 2018-2019 New Play Development Cohort, Pipeline Theatre 2017-2018 PlayLab, and The Civilians 2016-2017 Field Research Team. They have loved participating in artist residencies with RudeFusion@Crashbox, Judson Memorial Church, and The Barn Arts Collective.

BFA/NYU Tisch. MA/UT Austin.