Leilah Weinraub and I first met over Zoom during a Degrowth (an international movement for the global North to consume less and completely reduce production to preserve the planet) book club that our mutual friends, Atheel El Malik and Terence Nance, were also a part of. It was the first year of the pandemic, and stuck behind our screens we fortified our knowledge of the external world and our relation — and responsibility — to it, through conversation about the ecological future. The Earth is in decay. There was a sincerity about our desire to connect with it, to know how to be with it; everything during that time felt tectonic, urgent. Times have increasingly worsened, yet the palpability of evolution was potent in this book club. We read seminal Degrowth texts by Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel, and we discussed what possibilities existed in the future, not only for our species, but for all the beings we share this world with.
Fast forward five years, after the incredible success of “Shakedown,” Weinraub’s last film about a Los Angeles Black lesbian strip club, and fashion label Hood by Air, where she was the creative director and co-founder, she is now rigorously playing around with the art of storytelling — facilitating, writing and acting in plays. Through her work, there is an emphasis on relationships and how they impact both our current existence and our future. This presence, this inquiry, is so palpable throughout the full scope of her work.
Now, Weinraub is part of the Hammer’s Made in L.A. 2025 exhibition, presenting a piece of her own, “The Kids,” which spans video, performance and billboard installation. She also stars in an episodic film called “Theater” by the New Theater Hollywood, another Made in L.A. participant this year. As an extension of Made in L.A., “The Kids” will also show as a live performance over three nights (Oct. 17-19) at New Theater Hollywood’s space on Santa Monica Boulevard. The description for “The Kids” explains that it’s showcasing “survival as a performance for the future.” The future is a theme resolute in Weinraub’s imagination and propulsion to make the best work she possibly can.
We talked over Zoom about working-class love stories, doing voice-over work, acting in Marxist films and being Capricorns. (The interview is accompanied by a photo essay from Weinraub’s friend and collaborator, the artist Kiernan Francis, inspired by the themes of the play.)
Fariha Róisín: Do you remember we were in a book club together?
Leilah Weinraub: Oh, my God, yes — the Degrowth book club. That was a really cool book club, I’ve been telling people about it …
FR: Capitalism is failing us, obviously. So, Degrowth seems like the only way … I also watched “Seek No Favor” [Leilah’s short film with my friend, Elle Clay, which is a Black lesbian vigilante rom-com] recently.
LW: Oh, cool. Where?
FR: Well, I was on the BlackStar Film Festival jury. So I watched it before everybody. I’m loving everything that you’re doing right now. Tell me, how have you been?
LW: During the pandemic, we were doing that book club together, but I was developing features too. I was developing “Shakedown” into a narrative adaptation, and I was doing that in a very Hollywood way, with an agent and going to producers and developing it top down. Not like the project itself was created, but in a Hollywood way, which is: you have an idea, you put the pieces together and you’re like, go. It worked and didn’t work. But I was looking for an entrance, a way to work with actors. So I started engaging more with an actor community and now I’m part of this actor’s studio where we have these monthlong intensives and work on plays. And I’ve been doing that since the pandemic. I met Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel [collaborators and artists from New Theater Hollywood, Leilah stars in the duo’s work for the Hammer exhibition] because we have friends in common, and they’re interested in similar stuff. They came to L.A. and in their process, talking to them a lot about what’s needed, what kind of work could be brought to the world next, they asked me to be in their episode. But I [also] have my own work I’m bringing to the Hammer Museum, and I think I’m kinda taking up a lot of space in the show. So I’m starring in their episode, plus I have my own film that’s in an installation, and I have this billboard installation, I have a play called “The Kids” that’s at the New Theater, and that’s my own work.
FR: OK, tell me about all these projects.
LW: It’s a three-parter.
FR: Talk me through the three-parter.
LW: It was a way for me to process the end of all kinds of relationships. I made a story that was about four friends who do a performance together that only they can do together. The way that I’ve been doing this process is I’ll have an idea and I bring it to people and they write it with me. The first person I did that with was [the artist] Mykki Blanco. I was like “Hey, I have an idea about these four friends that are caryatids” — which are those sculptures that hold up buildings, you know? — “I have four friends who work together as these stone-made columns. Should we write on this?” They were like, “Oh, I really like this idea. Yeah.” The first iteration of this play was Mykki’s written version of it, a more straightforward version of: they’re stone sculptures that are friends, kids that work together. I’ve been doing that in different sessions with different writers. And usually the writers are young — my last writing group, everyone was under 25. They’re really responsive to this idea about being young, being friends, knowing you have all these ideas and all this ambition, and you’re in New York. It also feels like this enormous amount of pressure and impossibility, and that you’re in a David and Goliath struggle. You feel like the world is built on your labor, or built on the idea of who you are. But you don’t get to generate or help. You kind of feel stuck.
The story is fun. Things happen. They do drugs, and it takes them into a dimension. In that dimension they view the constraints of the world; they take each other to court. I’m in the play and I act as sort of a narrator and kind of my own character.
The reason I brought it to Max and Calla is because I was in a more formal development thing inside of Hollywood, which lacks a process where you get to generate totally new ideas. Things need to be fast but more formal. I brought the project to New Theater to have it be more chill. Everyone wants to be big, like, “We’re gonna make it to Broadway!” But it has to be successful. Really f— successful. And also, there’s a lot of scarcity with money — nobody has a job, so people have to have normal jobs on the side. There’s this thing about being an artist and having another job, it’s not a thing. It’s as if you saw me working somewhere, you’d be worried. It wouldn’t be cool. Do you know what I mean?
FR: Yeah, all of it. I’m just coming on the journey with you.
LW: I love bringing new work to museums because it’s different from the film world, where it has to be so clearly defined. “Shakedown” got placed because it was received in a museum context. So this world of “The Kids” is coming out in a similar way, and that feels fab. It’s a four-channel video and there are drawings. I’m acting, but that’s in Max and Calla’s work.
FR: How has the expansion been? ‘Cause that’s a lot to take on.
LW: All those things are extremely immediate once you can harness them. Drawing is really immediate. It’s not managing a production, it’s not coordinating, it’s actually intimate. It’s small, and it can be private. It’s pencil and paper. And acting is the same way: it’s immediate, it’s with other people, it feels like something’s in the room because it is. I wanted to build this groundwork, a framework, that was very clear. I feel like I’m a spectacle girl after all the years of fashion and I like that, you know? [But] I needed to come all the way down to what I’m able to control, personally. My own body, my own voice. The mark of my own hand.
FR: It feels like there’s a different sense of intimacy with yourself, making something more individual. There’s something almost meditative to what you’re doing.
LW: Yeah, for sure. And also, I wanted to become a better director.
FR: How did you know you wanted to be a director in the first place?
LW: How did I want to be a director?
FR: How did you know that you were one?
LW: I used to work at this store in L.A. and I met this director and he took me on as his intern/assistant/protege. I was filming a documentary with him. His name is Tony Kaye, he’s a wild personality, and in the ‘90s he was the biggest-grossing commercial director — also he was a spectacle queen and a show queen in Hollywood. He had a movie called “American History X” that came out.
He paid for me to go to college and he was amazing to me. I went to Antioch College and I studied with these amazing slate filmmakers that I fit in with really well. They’re anarchists. It was filmmaking that was just immediate. Whatever means you have, whatever tools you have for video. It wasn’t like USC film school. There’s not really technical stuff, you know? There was no money. But I learned everything there. And I worked for amazing filmmakers who are old-school labor filmmakers. I inherited that as part of my thingy. Even in “The Kids,” even with Hood by Air, everything I do is through the lens of how you identify with your labor. We all have to work; we all have to negotiate with labor. It’s coalition building.
FR: That understanding of coalition building — or even, the lack of it — it’s like the scenes of the writer’s strike in Max and Calla’s film [showing in Made in L.A.]. We’re seeing Hollywood face itself in such a way. I think also with the U.S. empire, the veil is lifting. All of the mechanisms that have kept this orchestration going are beginning to collapse. And the only way forward, it seems, is actually having real relationships with people. Have you watched “Fallen Leaves” by Aki Kaurismäki? It’s a working-class love story that came out, like, two years ago.
LW: It’s a rom-com? This is exactly what I want. This is the kind of thing that I wanna act in. I want to be in a rom-com so bad. But I need it to be like this, you know?
FR: Is that exciting? Being on screen?
LW: You know, I thought I was going to be a voice-over actor and I really wanted to be an animated character …
FR: Really?
LW: I was like, “This is what my calling is.” I’d see Kim Kardashian in — what’s that cartoon that she’s in? — anyways, I was like “Oh, my God, I really wanna be an inanimate object like a cat or dog.” I’ve only done two films where I do voice-over. The first one was a fiction documentary and then I also am doing this film with a collective called Total Refusal out of Vienna. It’s an essay film about Washington, D.C. They’ve never been to America, but they’re doing this whole in-video game movie about the Capitol. I can explain their Marxist essay in a way that I feel … I can apply the theory. In the acting of it, hopefully, I can translate that theory, which is an extraordinarily important thing. These are very alive, difficult, important, relational situations. You just gotta do the job — [I’m a] Capricorn.
FR: You gotta do the job! I’m a Capricorn too.
LW: No, you’re not! Stop it! When’s your birthday?
FR: I’m 10th of January. Are you a December Capricorn?
LW: Yeah. I’m the Nicki Minaj side. I’m the first day, giving almost —
FR: Sag?
LW: Yeah, but I’m not. I don’t completely identify with Capricorn. I have lots of Virgo … it’s like, sorry about that. But what are your others?
FR: I’m Cancer moon, Cancer rising. I was born on an eclipse and a full moon. I’m a sun-moon opposite. It’s psychotic. Interesting, emotional, deep, but the depth of feeling is just psychotic.
LW: I am a Pisces rising.
FR: OMG, aw. This explains so much.
LW: I know. That’s why the future … it’s all about the future. I’ve been doing the reverse aging thing. I’m not really understanding how I’m describing time, but I like it. It’s just very Pisces, you know?
Kiernan Francis is a New York–based filmmaker, photographer, stylist and casting director working across film, fashion and photography to explore image, performance and subculture through intimacy, identity and queerness rooted in art, nightlife and underground storytelling.
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