SHOUT Festival

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SHOUT grew out of a desire to celebrate and promote the diversity of Birmingham’s LGBT cultural community. Launching in 2009, SHOUT Festival (a project of Birmingham LGBT) was created as a direct response to a significant lack of representation for of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer in Birmingham’s arts venues.

Each year since we have grown and changed building in ambition and taking on new challenges, we’ve been a film festival and an arts festival, we’ve worked in different venues, we’ve started new conversations and taken on new shapes and ideas. In recent years we have developed a robust and dynamic annual festival taking place for 10 days each November.

In 2017 we introduced the first Birmingham LGBT History to coincide with LGBT History Month in the year of the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offence Act.  We are now well into our ninth festival year, and a firmly fixed and much anticipated highlight in the city’s cultural calendar.

In June of 2017 we received the news that SHOUT Festival had been successful in its application to join Arts Council England‘s National Portfolio for 2018-2022. Becoming a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) will allow SHOUT to take a significant step forward in our work, our partnerships, and in delivering the festival. We will expand our work into new areas; support and develop emerging artists, work with venues to make them more accessible and inclusive for queer people, commission new artistic work, and continue bring the highest quality queer art to the city.

We are so proud to represent and platform the voices and experiences of queer people in Birmingham and the Midlands.

We look forward to continuing to grow in the future, we remain dedicated commitment to furthering Queer Arts and Culture in the region. Our activity will focus on celebrating queer identity in all its intersections, creating new opportunities for Queer Artists in the midlands, and platforming the voices and experiences people in Birmingham and the wider midlands to audiences locally, nationally, and internationally.

To find out more about the next SHOUT Festival, click here.

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