Open Mic Third Thursdays continue with an evening of spoken word, featuring shah noor hussein & Ryanaustin Dennis, and other amazing poets throughout the Bay Area.

Sign up for your chance to read some of your poetry at the museum in the form below.

Featured Performers:

shah noor hussein is a writer, educator and multimedia artist, currently studying as an esteemed Cota Robles Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in the Cultural Anthropology doctoral program. shah's writing, which has been publish in Umber Magazine (2019), Color Theory (2019), The Black Aesthetic (2018), and CUNJUH (2017),focuses on black feminism, diaspora, and visual studies. They recently served as a Writing Fellow at California Institute for Integral Studies and Teaching Fellow for the Peralta Community College System.

shah's research aims to (re)center marginalized voices in dialogues on alternative epistemologies and cultural reproduction through a multimedia study of “Girls Music” in their home country, Sudan. They currently work in the community as an adjunct professor at Laney College and UC Berkeley, as well as a scholar-writer-artist based in Oakland.

For more information, you can find shah at SHAHNOORHUSSEIN.COM

Ryanaustin Dennis is an Oakland-based curator/artist/writer/cultural strategist. As the former founding member of The Black Aesthetic, a curatorial collective, their practice is concerned with how 20th and 21st century experimental performance, film, and writing histories are shaped by the metaphysics of blackness.

They have done curatorial work for E.M. Wolfman Bookstore, Kadist, SFMOMA Open Space, Eastside Arts Alliance, Betti Ono, Soundwave Biennial, and is a Southern Exposure Curatorial Council Fellow.

They currently co-curate the Black Life series at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and is a co-founder of a small press, Pro Arts Community Press at Pro Arts Gallery and Commons.

‍They were also featured on our MoAD blog.