For her next act, Lydia B Kollins flips Drag Race on its head — again

It turns out that Lydia B Kollins wasn't just boogying her way through RuPaul's Drag Race season 17, starting a relationship with Kori King in the werk room, making herstory with her All Stars 10 casting, and clawing her way to a top 4 spot in the first-ever Tournament of All Stars. Kollins was also working on a book that documented her unrivaled breakout year alongside creative partner Ava Grace, a Pittsburgh-based photographer who's exploring a new chapter of her own through this collaboration.

Together, Kollins and Grace have created a photography book titled Lydia Lydia Lydia: A Collection of Photographs, which outlines each step in the Drag Race star's gagworthy rise to fame throughout 2025, and that was somehow fully published before the year ended. This isn't a series of social media pictures, carousels, and/or vertical videos — which are fabulous in their own right — but a physical document that feels deeply intimate to existing fans and dazzlingly ambitious to casual observers who might be experiencing this level of world-building within the art form of drag for the first time.

In an exclusive interview with Out, Lydia B Kollins and Ava Grace discuss the creative process behind Lydia Lydia Lydia, which contains over 300 photos documenting nearly every single runway look in Kollins's journey competing in two back-to-back Drag Race seasons — plus never-before-seen design sketches, sewing notes, conceptual drawings, and personal journaling-style entries written by both Kollins and Grace throughout this unparalleled collaborative experience.

"I had heard murmurings that Lydia was away at 'summer camp,'" Grace tells Out, alluding to the famously secretive filming process surrounding a new season of Drag Race. "In my mind, I was like, 'I just want one shoot with her, just one shoot!' We had only worked together at drag shows before, so I thought it would be really cool to just get a shoot with her for one of her looks or something."

Kollins, looking as peaceful and relaxed as ever, says that the collaboration came together pretty organically. "It started as soon as I got back from Drag Race, because we started to plan photo shoots, and the creative package, and the rollout of my Drag Race package," Kollins tells Out. "It started when we did that first photo shoot at the park, for the first runway, and the rest of it was really spearheaded by Ava."

Such murmurs reached Grace as someone who's been "in the drag scene, in some sense or another, since 2011-2012, in Pittsburgh." She adds, "I used to do drag, which Lydia loves to—"

"Ava Lunch, honey!" Kollins blurts out before Grace finishes that sentence. "Bring it back."

"There's still some videos in the depths of YouTube that Lydia loves to remind me about," Grace says, though not as thrilled as Kollins, who has the joyous smile of a little kid who just got to tease their sister in front of other people. "But yeah, I came up back in the day, at the Blue Moon, which became a really well-known bar. It's where Alaska and Sharon [Needles] came up through."

"And then I started my transition, so I took a step back" from drag, Grace recalls. It wasn't until the 2020 lockdown that Grace picked up a camera and taught herself photography for the first time. "I was like, 'You know what? I miss going out. I miss my queer friends. I miss being surrounded by queer community.' At that point, I was trying to live pretty under the radar. I wasn't even out at my job. But I just missed queer people, so I started taking my camera to drag shows."

Even though she loves photography, Grace is not interested in pursuing it full-time. "That would be exhausting, and I'm not into hustle culture," she says in a way that is so fiercely candid that it makes us all giggle. "I like having a 401(k) and health insurance." Amen, sister!

"My day job is working in LGBTQ+ healthcare, and I'm getting my master's in public health right now," Grace adds. "Photography is just a passion project for me."

Yet, upon hearing that Kollins was back in Pittsburgh, Grace made her move.

"Lydia was like, 'I have some ideas,'" Grace recalls. "We got together, she had made me a mood board. And here we are now: A photo shoot of almost every single runway look she's worn on the show."

Kollins recalls her thought process before any work on the book actually started. On the one hand, "it might seem a little early to come out" with something like a memoir, she considered. On the other hand, this was an "insane" enough year worth documenting — "to just memorialize it all on page," as Kollins puts it. "My own personal scrapbook, or memoir of the year that we've had together, and the year that we've had in general."

The decision to create something physical does, indeed, feel intentional for a year like 2025. "I love digital media. I love film. I love podcasts, and all of the sort," Kollins says. "But in a world where A.I. is on the rise, it's very cool to have this physical memory in front of you that can't be erased."

"Unless you have a paper shredder in front of you," Kollins teases. "But the children yearn for the libraries! We can't help it."

Grace's attachment to physical media runs deep, too. "I grew up with a family that always had a camera around. My grandma always had one. My mom always had one. So we were very much a photo album type of family, and we still have all of those."

"I love flipping through photo albums. I love physical media," Grace says. So, when it came to creating Lydia Lydia Lydia as a physical book, there was simply no hesitation. "I was like, 'I want this. I want to hold this in my hands this whole year.'"

Looking back at this wild transition period from Drag Race season 17 into All Stars season 10, Kollins still feels like it was all a "complete blur" and "whirlwind." To that end, she credits Grace for pushing her to look deeper into the archives. "She would say, 'We should have some behind-the-scenes in this as well. Do you have any clips, or any screenshots, or stills, or outfit-creating images, or anything that we can include in the book?' I had forgotten how much I had documented from the process, and it's now all included in the book. It was a trip down memory lane for me, too."

All things considered, what is Kollins's favorite shoot in the entire book?

"It would have to be the one that I was eliminated on: the black and white Ball look," Kollins says, without hesitation. "The shoot was very, like, Giallo [film genre] and German Expressionism inspired, in this massive barrel… A full pipe. It looked so massive on Ava's camera. The way that it was edited, and the way that it was shot, it just scratches the deepest itch of my smooth little brain. I love that shoot."

For context: The shoot in question came to life as a video, too, shared by the Drag Race star on YouTube as, "The Scissoring of Lydia Kollins."

Grace is once again hilariously candid when asked about her experiences capturing Kollins's favorite shoot, referencing a passage in the book in which she [Grace] writes:

"When Lydia originally told me about her inspiration for this photoshoot, she kept talking about some bizarre 1920s film called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Because I'm a 37-year-old woman and not a turn of the century suffragette who survived the sinking of the Titanic, I had never heard of nor seen the movie."

While researching the German Expressionist aesthetic that Kollins had referenced, Grace kept seeing "these Germanic expressionist, brutalist, tall, cold structures, with big shadows and very stark contrast."

Grace tells Out that she immediately thought of a "sewer pipe," but told Kollins that she didn't "want to wade through poop." The solution? "A skate park!" Grace reveals.

What's next for Kollins? Well, the All Stars 10 finalist is determined to star in a horror film.

"If the director of Smile 3 [Parker Finn] is reading this, put me in your movie," Kollins declares. "I went to school for film. My first love, creatively, is filmmaking. I've always imagined myself behind the camera, but growing up, I would make countless movies that are just stored on my hard drive, and I would be the only person who could star in them. So I've basically been preparing my entire life to be in a horror movie, one way or another."

Grace praises Kollins's filmmaking talents by referencing the aforementioned skate park shoot.

"Just hearing the way her brain works was so wild. I'm like, 'How is she conceptualizing this from her brain and being able to say it?'" Grace gushes. "So, truly, anyone would be lucky to have her behind the camera, in front of the camera, or whatever. Someone put her in a horror movie!"

"I would not complain," Kollins adds.

Lydia Lydia Lydia: A Collection of Photographs is available for sale on Amazon.

For tickets and more information about the upcoming live event cohosted by the two authors, visit QBurgh.com.