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

Kairos Looney is a multidisciplinary artist and petunia gatherer. Mainly, they direct, write, and perform plays, teach, design sound, and illustrate. They direct plays from within relationships. 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.

Their own plays, like House of Telescopes, Radclyffe and the Archivist, and Berserk: or, Twylah’s in from Make-Believe, are big, impossible plays about autistic, trans & femme protagonists who create inner worlds to survive material conditions. Another of their plays, Salt Kid Watches Brooklyn Burn, is a biomythographic punk rock concert. Another play, Show Tom, is a one person elegaic epic poem. Some more of their plays, like Creation, call on the ridiculous to satirize settler coloniality, and others, like Eel, dramatize the obsessive voyeurism of eggs, and make odd the desire to capture what- or whomever is beyond one’s own experience. All Kairos’ directing and playwriting work live in the legacy of theatremaker Liz Swados, who first taught them to write from the interiority of a supposed foe, or as Mz Lz said, ‘from the back door.’

What about petunias? Kairos is learning how to gather petunias. Gathering petunias is a metaphor they invoke from novelist Alice Walker, who, in an essay Kairos loves, imagines another way of practicing belonging amongst/for beings denied humanness. They practice, 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. 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. Words they might use to describe themself are sapphic fag, femme, and gender derider. 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.

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.

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 Playwright 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.

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. Their first full length, a one-person-show-meets-punk-rock-concert called Salt Kid Watches Brooklyn Burn, premiered at Joe’s Pub in the 2017 Downtown Urban Arts Festival. Their first full production, House of Telescopes, premiered at ART/NY, produced by Pipeline Theatre in spring 2024.

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.