About

Oscar K. (he/him) is an award-winning playwright, lyricist/librettist, performance poet, filmmaker, and producer from Los Angeles, CA.

Find Oscar on IG @velveteen_fxggot.

Oscar was the 2018 Los Angeles County Youth Poet Laureate and is the author of SING THE BIRDS HOME (2019, Penmanship Books). He is a senior at Harvard College studying gender studies and theater. He received the 2023 Jane Coolidge and Walter Muir Whitehill Prize and is a John Harvard Scholar.

Plays Oscar received the 2022 Phyllis Anderson Prize for Playwriting from the American Repertory Theater for SWAN, a play. SWAN premiered in the 2023 Moonbox Productions’ Boston New Works Festival. SWAN was previously developed in the inaugural Theater Offensive Emergent Artist Residency Cohort, an 18-month program of artistic and professional development for QTPOC artists, and had a work-in-progress showing in March 2023.

Musicals Oscar is the lyricist/librettist and executive producer of ISCARIOT: THE MUSICAL, which had its world premiere at the Agassiz Theatre at Harvard College in December 2022. He is co-lyricist/librettist of THE FORTUNATES, which had its virtual world premiere at the Harvard ARTS FIRST Festival in April 2021. He is the lyricist/librettist of ARE YOU HAPPY?, a new musical that was produced (in excerpted form) at the 2022 Harvard Playwrights Festival and is currently in development.

Theatrical Work Oscar recently served on the production team of Fagtasia, a Brooklyn-based theatrical drag show centering trans and femme performers. He was a 2022 summer production & dramaturgy intern at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, M.A. and has interned for Harvardwood and Janet Yang Productions.

At Harvard, Oscar has served as technical producer, assistant director, and other roles on student productions, such as a devised production of Ubu Roi, The Pirates of Penzance (with the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players), and productions with Harvard College Opera and Harvard BlackC.A.S.T. He is a staff writer for Harvard Crimson Arts.

Poetry Oscar served as the 2018 Los Angeles County Youth Poet Laureate. His debut poetry book, SING THE BIRDS HOME, is out now. As Youth Poet Laureate, he performed for an audience of over 900 at the 2019 Equity Summit, presented by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. He has also performed in support of the California Association of Human Relations Organizations (CAHRO), the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the Los Angeles Public Library, and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Awards Oscar is a two-time Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwrighting and a Poetry Mentee in the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program Class of 2020. His work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the California Young Playwrights Contest, and the 2019 Palette Poetry Prize longlist (top 3% submissions). He has participated in the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, Winter Tangerine Summer Workshops, the David Henry Hwang Institute workshop, and VONA Voices workshop, and competed in the 2018 Get Lit Classic Slam.

Film A PRAYER FOR MY MOTHER, a short film that Oscar co-produced, won Best High School Film in the 2022 Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the American Pavilion at Cannes. He received the 2018 Emerging Artist Award from MY HERO International Film Festival. Oscar’s short film From AIDS to Advice: LGBTQ+ Seniors Tell Their Stories received 1st Place in High School Documentary, Playas de Tijuana received 1st place in High School Experimental, and Sincretismo received 3rd place in Student/Mentor. From AIDS to Advice was also recognized by the Heritage Film Festival. Sincretismo was one of 16 films selected out of 274 submissions for the 2019 WESTFLIX Film Festival, and received the Gaulke Award for Visual Storytelling. Sincretismo received 2nd Place in Documentary from the 2019 CineYouth Film Festival, Finalist for the 2019 New Optics Film Festival, and was selected for the 2019 Sierra Canyon Film Festival and the National Film Festival for Talented Youth.

Other Plays Oscar has written three one-act plays: Self-Portrait at Bethany (2019), Alex Is (Not) Dead (2018), and Expulsion From Paradise (2017), all of which were produced in the Harvard-Westlake Playwrights Festival. Expulsion From Paradise (2017) was a Finalist in the 33rd annual California Young Playwrights Contest, an award given to 10 out of 432 submissions.

Performance Oscar is part of QueerWise, an LGBTQ+ writers and performers group in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. He has performed original monologues in multiple productions, most notably Shades of Disclosure: Who Are You?, a production about the HIV/AIDS crisis, which opened the 2017-2018 season of the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz, CA, and ran for a total of 14 performances. Other shows have included MARGINALIZED (2020), AIDS/US/QUEERWISE (2018), QueerWoke (2018), and Sex: Motion in Emotion (2017).

Resume is available upon request.