About Odd Salon

Odd Salon curates cocktail hour lectures highlighting strange-but-true stories from history, science, art, and adventure, live on stage, over cocktails. We bring experts and enthusiastic amateurs together to explore history’s overlooked and under-told stories, from legends of lost cities to masters of art forgery, engineering failures to murderous sideshow performers, daring heists, questionable taxidermy, and tales of epic revenge. Sometimes with stick figures. 

Founded in 2014 by Annetta Black, Tre Balchowsky, and Rachel James, Odd Salon is inspired by the salonnieres of the Enlightenment, the illustrated lectures of the Victorian period, and a strong desire to tell weird stories in good company. After several years of hosting salons in San Francisco, in 2018 we expanded to add a new chapter in New York City.

We are a community project, centered around a Fellowship of speakers and an extended family of Members, and we have partnered with amazing organizations including the California Historical Society, the Long Now Foundation, the California Academy of Sciences, the tall ships of the Grey’s Harbor Historical Seaport, and the Exploratorium science museum.

As a community-focused and mission-driven organization dedicated to the diffusion of unusual knowledge, we are proud to be a membership supported, fiscally sponsored project of the InterCulture Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization.