Outburst Queer Arts Festival

The Annual OUTBURST Queer Arts Festival brings you eight days of world class and new local theatre, performance, film, visual art and discussion, celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender creativity in venues across the city of Belfast. The festival showcases international and homegrown talent, with the aim of sharing and exploring LGBT experiences and bringing exciting, entertaining and challenging new work to the Belfast stage.

The festival is a curated programme, so not all submissions will be selected. Outburst Queer Arts Festival is a queer festival, so we tend to look beyond mainstream LGBTQ+ thematics to offer audiences thought-provoking, fresh and challenging work around sexuality and gender (and all that intersects with those) that they won’t experience elsewhere in this part of the world. We encourage anyone submitting a proposal to check out previous festival events in the brochures in our archive HERE, especially over the last three years, before sending through your proposal. You can also check out our broader strategy HERE, to get a sense of what Outburst is all about and our vision for the queer work that we are passionate about supporting.

The festival is a curated week of brilliant new queer ideas in art and culture. We carefully cook up a mix of work that we’ve seen and can’t wait to share, along with shows, publications, events and happenings that we’ve commissioned or co-developed in collaboration with queer artists and other co-conspirators at home and beyond. All of the work we showcase in the festival is new work, keeping it fresh and vital for audiences and relevant to the moment we are in. We love creative ideas that take audiences beyond the obvious and the normative. So we centre intersectional work that challenges our thinking, asks interesting questions, brings us to unexpected spaces and places and reimagines the possibilities of queer art to transform.

Tender transgressions and beautiful disruptions can come in surprising forms, big and small, loud and quiet, and we’re here for it all.

We always make sure there’s room for as many hidden treasures and exciting new creative voices as possible in Outburst. We accept submissions on a rolling basis until the start of summer each year. We especially love work from artists and writers in Northern Ireland / The North Of Ireland / This Place but we programme work from all over the world.