Highways’ sponsors a variety of festivals and series that explore a specific community need.
Highways’ Latina/o New Works Festival & Working Titles: Latina/o New Works series, each presented annually for the past 6 years, feature new performance, spoken word, dance, and inter-disciplinary works that speak to the evolution of established and emerging Latina/o artists on both a local and international level. Some of the artists who have performed in past installments include Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra, Cristina Moura, Ivonne Coll, contra-tiempo, Diane Rodriguez, Monica Palacios, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan, and many more.
Highways’ Annual Poetry Festival, presented for the past six years, features embrace local and national poets, slam champions, youth poets, editors, actors, authors, teachers and cultural workers from the queer, black, Asian, literary, Latina/o and hip-hop communities.
Highways’ BEHOLD!: A Queer Performance Festival, inspired by Highways’ previous Ecce Lesbo-Ecce Homo Festival, has expanded to a summer-long series of new LGBTQ performance, dance, spoken word, theater, multi-media, and ritual.
Queer Mondays is a non-elitist, un-curated LGBT experimental performance series that takes place on the last Monday of every month. It’s an ever-changing grab bag of short pieces and happenings that has something for everyone and you never know what you’re gonna get! QM is dedicated to providing a consistent venue for the development of new queer work, and is open to all artistic disciplines.
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We have presented hundreds of other works including:
- Action Conversations: the culmination of a fifteen-week workshop that joined Iraq war veterans, performing artist, and activists in a series of verbal and physical conversations about their lives, their life histories, and aspirations returned after sell-out performances in February, 2008. Through a collaborative process, the performers initiated a discourse on identity, heroics, mortality and civic duty.
- AIDS EVERLASTING: Honoring World AIDS Day (Four evenings of performances honoring depictions of AIDS from the worlds of theatre, performance, dance, spoken word, and music)
- Readings from Explore and Express by Emerging Artists with Disabilities (Celebrating Disability Awareness Month)
- The presentation of Nicaraguan Theatre Company El Teatro Justo Rufino Garay in partnership with the National Performance Network, Performing Americas, UCLA Live and Los Angeles International Latino Theatre Festival (FITLA) / this residency featured free workshops by the company to local emerging Latino performance artists
- Standing on the Edge: Highways’ first annual Youth Choreography Festival (choreographers and performers from LA High Schools)
- TEADAWORKS: Annual New Performance Development Lab and Festival, a festival showcasing new interdisciplinary performances by artists of color who fearlessly tackle personal, political, and global issues and boldly experiment with multiple art forms
- Phidias Women: a series of performances written and performed by Latinas
- Treasure in the House Asian Pacific American Performance and Visual Art Series: 4 weeks of new performance by local, regional and national artists
- LIP (Lesbians in Power) Service Cabaret Series: Sunday evenings of new performance by Lesbians of Color.









