OUTsider, a mischievous non-profit queer transmedia festival and conference celebrating creative nonconformity and cross-disciplinary play, will take place February 14-18, 2018 in Austin, TX. OUTsider’s fourth incarnation was hailed with a rebel yell that has been gaining much momentum as of late: “OUT of Time.”
OUTsider Artistic Director Curran Nault encouraged submissions woven with anachronistic, asynchronistic, and apocalyptic threads of the idiom. He says, “Time is tricky: It’s a thief, an illusion, an investment. It flies, binds, disappears. Time is not neutral. It’s the medium of sacred history, assuming objectivity and linearity. It’s a purveyor of naïve progress narratives and ‘normal’ life cycles. It’s a tool of imperialism, relegating infantilized Others to the past: stuck, stagnant, backward, and requiring modernization and salvation. Time deserves a good queering.”

This year’s lineup of queer happenings complicates, confuses, and contemporizes history with live performance, screenings, workshops, panels, readings, parties, salons, music, installations, brunch, an early career retrospective, and will begin with a communal embodiment of possibility as festival attendees and artists alike enact the junior high dance of their queer fantasies. The annual tradition of the Legacy Award will continue with this year’s recipient, Lizzie Borden, the director, producer, writer, and editor of the feminist sci-fi film Born in Flames (1983). The ceremony includes a screening, extended conversation with Borden, and, of course, cake. Former awardees include transgender studies pioneer Sandy Stone (2017), post-porn performance artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens (2016), and queer punk trailblazers Tribe 8 (2015).

This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

OUTsider is an Austin-based 501c3 non-profit that celebrates the bold originality and creative nonconformity of the LGBTQ+ and Ally communities through the presentation of provocative, overlooked, and out-of-the-box film, performances, music, writing, and visual art. Through its annual festival and conference, OUTsider brings together queer artists, audiences, and scholars from around the globe to exchange ideas, ignite conversations, transcend boundaries, and experience new pleasures through artistic discovery.