AGMA Pride Caucus Presents:
Queering Civic Engagement: How Artists Can Advocate, Protest, Petition, and Vote for the Changes that Matter
With special guests Adam Odsess-Rubin and Lucy Sexton
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
8:00 p.m. ET
Join the AGMA Pride Caucus with special guests Adam Odsess-Rubin and Lucy Sexton to talk about rights, artistic freedom, organizing, and advocacy. On October 27 at 8:00 p.m. ET, we’ll lift up important legislation and ballot measures nationwide, talk about how to engage with your reps, and get a sense of what arts activism looks like on a local and national scale at this moment in time, focusing on the power of advocacy for the queer community in the arts — and how YOU can join in the fight.
The meeting is open to all AGMA members in good standing. Register here!
About Our Guests:
Adam Odsess-Rubin (He/Him) is the Founding Artistic Director of National Queer Theater (NQT) and the acclaimed Criminal Queerness Festival, showcasing censored and criminalized LGBTQ+ artists from around the world. Odsess-Rubin has directed community-based theater programs such as Write it Out! for playwrights living with HIV, New Visions Fellowship for Black trans artists, DREAMing Out Loud for LGBTQ undocumented writers, and Youth Write Now for young queer playwrights. Since 2021, he has been a lead Teaching Artist for Rainbow Connection, an intergenerational theater program for queer teens and elders in Fire Island. In 2023, he launched Staging Pride: Queer Youth Theater, a free afterschool theater program for marginalized LGBTQ+ youth in New York City at The Center. At NQT, Odsess-Rubin has presented work with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York Theatre Workshop, NYC Pride, HERE Arts Center, MCC Theater, and PAC NYC. Through NQT, he has raised over one million dollars for queer and trans artists since 2018, and has received praise for his work in The Advocate, The New York Times, American Theater Magazine, Playbill, and Time Out New York. Odsess-Rubin is a Teaching Artist and former Education Associate at New York Theatre Workshop, and served as the first Education and Community Programs Fellow at American Conservatory Theatre. Odsess-Rubin has published work in Howlround, Yale’s Theater Magazine and The Teaching Artist Journal, and is a 2020 Mayor’s Grant for Cultural Impact awardee and AM NY LGBTQ+ Power Player. BA: UC Santa Cruz MA: New York University.
Lucy Sexton (she/her) is a Brooklyn born producer, administrator, and performing artist who has worked in the fields of dance, performance, film, and public advocacy. She has served as Executive Director of the NY Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies, building them for the first time into an independent organization. From 2013-16 she worked as a Consulting Associate Artistic Director of the planned performing arts center at the World Trade Center, conducting field-wide outreach and developing the center’s artistic mission and plan. As a dance artist she works with Anne Iobst creating and performing the dance performance duo DANCENOISE which was founded in 1983, had a retrospective exhibit and performance at the Whitney Museum in 2015, and premiered a new piece at NY Live Arts in 2018. She has also directed and dramaturged plays by Spalding Gray, Tom Murrin, Nora Burns, and Heather Litteer; and produced documentaries by Charles Atlas for the BBC and Arte. She is the Executive Director of New Yorkers for Culture and Arts, an organization that through broad coalition-based advocacy, public messaging, research and education, aims to ensure a vibrant future for culture and arts that will benefit all New Yorkers.