Julio Torres

Julio Torres is a gay Salvadoran-American comedian, writer, and filmmaker whose sensibility is unlike almost anyone else working in comedy today -- surrealist, melancholic, tenderly queer, and quietly preoccupied with the experience of existing as an outsider. He came out publicly in a 2016 New Yorker profile that introduced his singular voice to a wider audience, describing his queerness as inseparable from the strange, object-obsessed interiority that defines his work. Torres became a staff writer on Saturday Night Live, where his sketches -- absurdist, gentle, non-satirical -- stood apart from the show's usual register. He created the comedy Los Espookys (2019) with Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen, a Spanish-language supernatural comedy set in an unnamed Latin American country that became a cult favorite for its queer warmth and total commitment to its own strange universe. His debut feature film Problemista (2023), which he wrote, directed, and starred in, is a surrealist portrait of an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant navigating New York's art world. A deeply queer artist in sensibility and in life, Torres has built one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American comedy.