Patrick Kennelly

Kennelly's debut feature film EXCESS FLESH world premiered at SXSW in March 2015 to much controversy and divisiveness (The Daily Beast called it “the most twisted movie at SXSW—and of the year.”). It is distributed by Midnight Releasing and is currently available on VOD/DVD, as well as being a curated selection on Shudder. Kennelly was a recipient of the 2008 Princess Grace Award for Theater, and has received numerous fellowship, grants, and awards for his work. He received his BFA in Film/Video at Cal Arts and an MFA in Theater Direction at UCLA. Kennelly is Artistic Director at renowned experimental arts center Highways Performance Space & Gallery, which recently celebrated its 30th Anniversary. He is also the founder and artistic director of Film Maudit 2.0 (www.filmmaudit.org), a new festival of outre cinema, which had its inaugural edition in November 2019. The fest is inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1949 one-off, Le Film Maudit, which celebrated a group of films that were criminally overlooked and neglected at the time. Kennelly calls his darkly-surreal, genre-infused, occasionally extreme dissections of identity, "raw pop."