César Cadabes is a Hawaii-born, San Francisco–based Queer Filipino American writer, solo performance artist, and cultural strategist. He came up in late-1980s and early-1990s San Francisco as an activist/artist advocating for HIV/AIDS awareness and justice, and as a community organizer in LGBTQ and Black and Brown communities across New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the last decade, those commitments have found their way to the stage and into storytelling. His artistic practice centers personal storytelling as cultural strategy — the intentional use of narrative to shift norms, honor queer Asian and Pacific Islander histories, and build long-term community resilience — and gives voice to lived experience with HIV/AIDS, migration, survival, and the civic imagination of the communities that raised him.

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Not My First Pandemic, César's first full-length solo work, directed by Kat Evasco, received the Best One-Man Show Award and the All About Solo Critics' Award at the 2021 United Solo Festival at Theatre Row in New York. It premiered at the Brava Theater Center's inaugural With You Festival in 2022, and was selected for 1st Stage's Logan Festival of Solo Performance in 2023.

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A three-time recipient of Individual Artist Grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission (2020, 2022, 2026), César is now developing a new autobiographical solo work, Aging, Cancer, and Fascism (working title) — also directed by Kat Evasco — drawn from his journals through three simultaneous cancer diagnoses in a single year, written against the backdrop of political upheaval and sustained attacks on science, research, and healthcare. The piece reclaims storytelling as protest, care as power, and the queer body as both archive and act of defiance.

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As Artistic Director of GAPA Theatre — the only intergenerational Queer and Trans Asian and Pacific Islander (QTAPI) theater collective — César mentors writers, performers, and storytellers across five artist cohorts. Under his leadership, GAPA Theatre has built community-centered partnerships with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Bindlestiff Studio, the Asian Art Museum, Brava Theater, the Center for Cultural Power, the Legion of Honor Museum, and Z Space, where in 2024 he produced and curated Echoes in the Diaspora. He has produced and curated AAPI performance for over a decade, with earlier producing roles at Bindlestiff Studio and the United States of Asian America Festival (USAAF).

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​As a cultural strategist, César extends his practice beyond the stage into civic engagement and advisory work. He was part of the 2026 National Cultural Organizing Cohort at the Center for Cultural Power — a program partnering artist disruptors, culture bearers, and organizers in the practice of cultural organizing — and advises the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) on multilingual AAPI civic engagement and family acceptance work. César was part of the inaugural cohort of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District's Advisory Board and was a 2021–2022 artist-in-residence at the Queer Cultural Center.