Patrick Kennelly creates work like a prism set on fire. A filmmaker, theater director, post-production surgeon, and curator of the bold and the unclassifiable, he operates in a space somewhere between sensory overload and ritual catharsis. His art doesn’t flirt with extremity—it marries it in a fever dream of broken identities, ecstatic violence, and surreal pop tropes bled raw.

 

He is the Artistic Director of Highways Performance Space & Gallery, one of L.A.’s longest-running experimental arts centers, now in its 36th year—a post that sees him curating avant-garde performance and visual art that might otherwise have no home. He also founded and directs Film Maudit 2.0, a genre-defying festival of "cinema that doesn’t behave," named after Jean Cocteau’s infamous “cursed film” pop-up. There, he champions the outliers, the unclassifiable, the too-strange-to-stream.

 

His debut feature, Excess Flesh (SXSW 2015), detonated polite film discourse with its bulimic, body-horror-fueled indictment of image culture and psychic collapse. The Daily Beast dubbed it “the most twisted movie at SXSW—and of the year.” Depending on who you ask, it's either a psychotic break caught on camera or a genre film that ate its own tail. His 2020 short film Hammurabi, distributed by ALTER, navigates religious retribution and generational trauma through a lens of mythic dread—fusing biblical justice with an eerie, modern intimacy. 

 

Kennelly’s upcoming feature, Earth, or The Monster of Tierra Amarilla, co-created with Leo Garcia, is an experimental theatrical film set in 1911 Northern New Mexico but structured like a ancestral hallucination. Blending magical realism, futurist philosophy, colonialist critique, and body horror, it follows Catalina, a pregnant landowner and descendant of Hispano settlers, as she confronts ecological and metaphysical collapse. Part one of a larger generational saga, Earth is studio-bound cinema as painted diorama, indebted to German Expressionism, Sirkian melodrama, Fassbinder’s theatrical alienation, and Lars von Trier’s emotional brutality. It’s also, somehow, about land rights, ghost memory, Catholic guilt, and the slow violence of history.

 

On stage, Kennelly navigates devised performance like a medium channeling static. Yet he’s also staged some of the 20th century’s most volatile dramatic minds: Sarah Kane, Amiri Baraka, Maria Irene Fornés, Sam Shepard, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and John Whiting—playwrights who weaponize fragmentation, confrontational minimalism, political poetics, and mythic collapse to carve deep into the cultural unconscious. His own work tends toward the collaborative, physical, nonlinear—a scream in a cathedral, staged with fluorescent lights and VHS static.

 

His 2012 performance spectacle Patty: The Revival refracted the life-myths of Patty Duke and Patty Hearst into a high-gloss, live-action pop trauma-loop—an operatic American eulogy wrapped in glitter and echo. It earned five L.A. Weekly Theater Award nominations, including Best Musical. Its upcoming sequel, PATTY vs. PATTY (The Algorithm Wars), spirals further into post-human delirium: ten Pattys, AI doubles, cancellation simulators, glitch-folk soundtracks, and a sentient concert engineered to erase her. A digital Passion Play staged at the end of history.

 

Kennelly holds a BFA from CalArts (Film/Video) and an MFA from UCLA (Theater Directing), and is a recipient of the Princess Grace Award. His work has been exhibited in 18 countries, though “exhibited” doesn’t quite capture it—these are works to be endured, absorbed, interrogated. Less screenings than transmissions. Less theater than possession.

 

If his aesthetic had a passport, it might read: Raw Pop meets Ritual Disruption, crossed with mythic dread and a refusal to resolve. Or maybe it’s just this: spectacle as sacrament, performance as purge.