ARTISTIC STATEMENT

As a writer, my goals are to disavow principles of coherent identity and moral purity; to lean into strangeness and magic and ritual and transcendence; to revel in language and in unexpected juxtapositions as sources of humor, destabilization, and beauty; to break open the circular ways in which we are stuck talking about authenticity and progress; and to create art that is simultaneously critical and multivalent, that is nuanced and self-contradictory. My plays often explore power in the crucible of the erotic; they are political, but they’re not a work of activism; they are wild, funny, extravagant, unsettling. I write to advance the gay theatrical lineage; I write against the mandate of the Diversity Checkbox; I write to leave an audience licking their lips.

SLOKA KRISHNAN
2024–2025 RESIDENT PLAYWRIGHT

Sloka Krishnan (he/him) is a playwright-lyricist interested in magic, extravagance, ritual, camp, and the disavowal of moral purity and coherent identity. His writing has been described as subversive, multilayered, and eviscerating (by a boy he once slept with) and as darkly surreal comedy (by a legitimate online publication). Now based in San Francisco, he was previously a 2020 recipient of an Artist Project Grant from the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, a 2017-2018 Horizon Theatre Playwright Apprentice (Atlanta, GA), and a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting. His full-length plays (THE BUGS, MAYBE POLITICS ARE OVER, THE GRAND TRANSSEXUAL DRAWETH NIGH) and shorter work have been developed and performed by Cutting Ball Theatre (San Francisco); Happy Accident Theatre, Horizon Theatre Company, Out Front Theatre, and Working Title Playwrights (Atlanta); Forum Theatre and the Rainbow Theatre Project (DC).