A yearlong conversation on self-knowledge, creative ownership, and freedom through community — curated by Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu

LOS ANGELES, CA — UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT) announces Lauren Palmer — artist, producer, entrepreneur, cultural architect, and founder of KeyTV Network — as its 2026–27 Artist-in-Residence. Across three quarterly sessions beginning Fall 2026, Palmer will engage TFT students in a sustained conversation about what it takes to build a creative life on one’s own terms: knowing yourself, owning your work, and using creative freedom in service of others.

The residency, titled Know Yourself, Own Yourself, Free Yourself to Build New Frameworks for Change, introduces a dimension of Palmer’s work rarely explored within institutional settings. Known globally as Keke Palmer — an Emmy Award-winning actor and television host, recording artist, producer, New York Times bestselling author, and media entrepreneur —  Lauren Palmer emerges here as a cultural thinker and institution builder whose career has consistently expanded the possibilities of authorship, ownership, and creative independence. Over more than two decades, Lauren has navigated nearly every sector of the entertainment industry while simultaneously developing new models for artistic agency through producing, entrepreneurship, platform creation, and community investment.

Rather than reflecting solely on a successful career, Palmer’s residency examines the intellectual frameworks that have informed it. This marks the launch of her first university-based artist residency, where she will share the methodologies and creative principles behind her practice directly with the next generation of filmmakers, theater artists, and media makers.

“Lauren Palmer builds an audience, platform, and framework for ownership on her own terms,” said Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu. “What she brings to TFT students is a method of empowerment through self-knowledge, authorship, and ownership towards emancipation as the goal. And it is exactly the kind of thinking our students need to navigate an industry that has not yet accounted for all of them.”

Taught in three sessions, the residency is curated by Dean Shimizu, who has designed a program of assigned readings for students in collaboration with Palmer that draw on critical theory, philosophy, and Black feminist thought. Students will arrive at each session prepared to meet Palmer’s experience with frameworks drawn from the thinkers whom Palmer engages herself including Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Frantz Fanon, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The sessions will be introduced and moderated by Dean Shimizu.

The three sessions follow a deliberate arc across the academic year:

In Fall 2026, Your Voice. Our Story. opens with the question at the center of every artist’s formation: what happens to your sense of self when the world constructs an image of you before you have had the chance to author it yourself? Palmer will speak from her own experience of growing up in public since age eleven, reframing what is commonly called fragmentation — the many parts, roles, and identities an artist inhabits — not as brokenness to be resolved, rather, as expansion to be integrated in building one’s distinct voice.

In Winter 2027, Owning Your Creative Power takes up the story behind her digital media network, KeyTV. Palmer will articulate a distinction that transformed her own trajectory: the difference between frameworks that suppress voices and frameworks that simply fail to account for them. That distinction — between active exclusion and structural erasure — is what led her to build rather than wait, and to understand the white space left by existing systems as a place of invention rather than defeat.

In Spring 2027, The Modern Multi-Hyphenate: Freedom Through Community closes the year with the argument that genuine freedom does not turn inward. Palmer will reflect on what it has taken to build across disciplines — acting, producing, entrepreneurship, media, authorship — and on the conviction that the fullest version of yourself is not the destination. It is what you give back to others beyond oneself.

The residency sessions will be held at Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus and are open to TFT students. The sessions are part of the broader UCLA TFT–KeyTV partnership, “From Blocking to Broadcast,” which supports student creators from development through distribution on the KeyTV platform.

The Year, In Brief:

Fall: Know yourself. Your image has been constructed by others. Reclaim by creating it.

Winter: Own yourself. Your labor has value. Build the infrastructure that reflects it.

Spring: Free yourself. Freedom is what you give back.

About UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

UCLA TFT is the first leading university to combine theater, filmmaking, and television production into a singularly focused administration. Home to more than 11,000 alumni including Carol Burnett, Charles Burnett, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Francis Ford Coppola, Julie Dash, Grace Lee, Justin Lin, Alexander Payne, Tim Robbins and Cauleen Smith, TFT is ranked among the top film and theater schools nationally. Under the leadership of Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu, TFT advances the banner Your Voice, Our Story — a commitment to training the next generation of dazzlingly diverse storytellers and scholars with the methods and frameworks of independence, innovation and impact inspired by the LA Rebellion legacy.

About Lauren Palmer / KeyTV

Lauren Palmer is an Emmy Award-winning actor, recording artist, producer, bestselling author, television host, and entrepreneur whose career spans film, television, music, publishing, and digital media. Working professionally in entertainment for over 25 years, Palmer has become one of the few contemporary artists to sustain a career across multiple creative industries while continually redefining the boundaries between performer, producer, executive, and founder. Her work reflects a sustained commitment to creative authorship, ownership, and the development of new institutional models that expand opportunities for emerging artists. In 2021, Palmer founded KeyTV Network, a creator-first media platform dedicated to cultivating diverse voices through original programming, education, and distribution. Conceived as both a production company and a creative ecosystem, KeyTV reflects Palmer’s broader philosophy that lasting change in the entertainment industry requires not only representation within existing institutions but the creation of new ones. The platform attracted more than 760,000 subscribers within its first three months and has continued to grow across digital platforms while supporting the work of emerging filmmakers and storytellers.