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THEATERLAB ANNOUNCES
3 ARTISTS
SELECTED FOR
20th Anniversary Season
August Honey, Jeremy Rafal, and Katie Zaffrann
Each to Develop Brand New Solo Works for THE GALLERY SERIES
Theaterlab announces its selection of three New York City artists for THE GALLERY SERIES, as part of Theaterlab’s 20th Anniversary season of programming
Presenting highly experimental, combustible, and pliable work – those selected for Theaterlab’s 2026 Gallery Series are August Honey, Jeremy Rafal, and Katie Zaffrann.
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Each work will be developed in Theaterlab’s signature short-form residency for solo performance, with audiences having two opportunities to witness each work at this early stage. All performances take place in Theaterlab’s smallest theatrical space, its 20-seat Gallery, which provides up to 40 individuals the opportunity to explore this work with the artist before further development.
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Since 2006, Theaterlab has been the gathering place for inquisitive audiences who are eager to see what’s next in live performance. The GALLERY SERIES champions the unique potential of the individual performer and challenges artists to craft ambitious explorations of the specific and intimate relationship between solo performer and spectator. As part of the 20th anniversary programming, Theaterlab has chosen these three daring solo performers to help mark this milestone and set their work before its very first audience.
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Each artist will receive up to 25 hours of development, a dedicated Production Assistant or Stage Manager, and a $500 cash support for the residency.
MEET THE ARTISTS
August Honey
Untitled (Skin and Salt)
August Honey is a multidisciplinary artist residing in Brooklyn, New York on Lenape land. Through acts of citation, choreography, textile installation, and (anti)language, they create work that celebrates QueerDisabled ways of being. August’s work seeks to honor the wisdom found in such forces as rage, interdependence, and intimacy. Through investigation of Queer and Crip studies, histories, and languages, they engage these ancestral forces and sculpt them into performance. They are a cofounder of Interlude dance company, the Triskelion Arts 2025 Research Resident Artist, and a 2024/25 AXIS Dance Company choreo-lab fellow. Their work has been presented at Three Dollar Bill, The Brick Theater, Berkeley Ballet Theater, Parkside Lounge, TICTAC Art Center, Henny Jurriens Foundation, and Mount Holyoke College.Â
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Presenting a dance in a web of lace in “Untitled (Skin and Salt)”, August Honey will use textiles to trace disabled lineages through a multimodal, movement-based, scholarly, and poetic installation. By extending their body beyond the bounds of flesh and connecting their work to a web of Disabled activists, artists, and scholars, Honey will create a work in which they thread the audience together and to themself.
Jeremy Rafal
Schubert Was a Rice QueenÂ
Jeremy Rafal is a Filipino-American actor, musician, writer, director, and educator based in NYC. He is a classical pianist who has performed widely and composed operas, including “Standing Above Pajaro”, which is based on the 1930s Watsonville riots.Â
In “Schubert was a Rice Queen”, Jeremy Rafal will take us back to Vienna in 1828. Composer Franz Schubert is dying, but not without throwing one last party. Re-introducing himself as an Aquarius, tea-spiller, and musical genius, he recollects the life of an artist in post-Napoleonic Vienna under Metternich, where anything erotic, foreign, or new is treated as a political threat. Souvenirs from the Orient become portals to imagined queer histories through piano performance, puppetry, and scandalous reminiscence, recasting Schubert as history’s unwritten rice queen.
Katie Zaffrann
Matriline
Katie Zaffrann is an actor, singer, wife, mother, lover of the outdoors, and mindfulness meditation teacher at the intersection of drama + dharma. An artist and creator in her own right, she wrote and curated her one-woman show Marry Me a Little: a cold feet cabaret, about the terror, bliss, panic, and joy of getting married, called “an enchanting delight” by BroadwayWorld.Â
“Matriline” is a somatic ritual with a time-traveling mother and her laundry. In this moment when the world we have known is shifting before our eyes, and even the air we breathe is at risk, American mothers are at the front lines. It’s a journey asking those who came before us: How did they survive the times of upheaval in which they lived? — and ask our children and grandchildren: how can we best guide them into a future we cannot see? Our immediate ancestors, perhaps, did not face the particular challenges we do. But others in history have seen similarly difficult, wild times. What could we learn from these women, if we knew their stories, about how to meet this moment for our own children?
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