Bryonn Bain

1. Brooklyn. Harvard Law. Wrongfully Arrested.

The Bain family came to Brooklyn from Trinidad in the 1960s. After skipping two grades, Bryonn was admitted to Columbia University at fifteen years old. Following graduate school at NYU, he went to Harvard Law School with a clear sense of what he wanted to fight for. In his second year, Bryonn was wrongfully arrested by the NYPD with his brother and cousin. After spending the night in jail, it took four months before the charges were dropped.  After the Village Voice cover story Bryonn wrote — "Walking While Black: The Bill of Rights for Black America" — went viral and received the largest response in the paper's history, his family told their story to twenty million viewers on 60 Minutes with Emmy award winner Mike Wallace. That media explosion led to over a dozen cases of identity theft, as well as wrongful felony and misdemeanor charges against Bryonn — until finally he sued the NYPD and won.

2. Lyrics From Lockdown.

Encouraged by his visionary mentor and law professor Lani Guinier’s suggestion that his story should be a “hip hop opera,” Bryonn turned the experience into a one-man, multimedia theater production, Lyrics From Lockdown, fusing hip-hop, spoken word, blues, calypso, classical music and comedy into more than forty characters. 

The work tells the story of his wrongful imprisonment and weaves in letters exchanged with Nanon Williams, a fellow poet and friend who was sentenced to death row at 17 years old. Executive produced by Gina and Harry Belafonte, Ron Simons, Delroy Lindo and Rob Reiner, the show has played record-breaking runs and received standing ovations at the Actors' Gang Theater, the Kennedy Center, the Apollo Theater, with the LA Philharmonic at the Skirball Center, Lincoln Center, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. It won Best Solo Performance from LA Weekly and the NAACP.

3. Building Programs.

The same work that built the show became the foundation for college courses and programs in prisons around the country. Bain taught for over a decade at Rikers Island, and developed arts-based courses to link Columbia, NYU, the New School, Long Island University and prisons across more than twenty-five states. 

Bryonn founded the Prison Education Programs at NYU and UCLA and taught their first courses behind bars. A professor of African American Studies, World Arts and Cultures, Theater, Film & Television, and at the School of Law at UCLA, Bain served as Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at Oxford and Cambridge universities. 

In 2022, he co-founded the Center for Justice at UCLA and serves as the Faculty Director.  His prison education work has extended from prisons across the US to the UK, to Uganda, South Africa and Ghana — where a new partnership is in development with the Pan-African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Institute of African Studies in Accra.

4. Three Continents. 300+ Venues. Five Books.

Author of five books — The Prophet Returns (2011), The Ugly Side of Beautiful (2012, with a foreword by Mumia Abu-Jamal), Rebel Speak: A Justice Movement Mixtape (2022, UC Press, with a foreword by Angela Davis), Fish & Bread / Pescado y Pan (a bilingual children's book), and Temple Worship (2025), Bain is an editor of the forthcoming anthology Arts & Abolition: Another World is Possible (2027) and the original poetry collection Black Magic.

Having sold-out shows at venues in colleges, prisons, theaters and festivals across the United States, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, his collaborators have included hip hop founder DJ Kool Herc, The Last Poets, Academy Award winners Jonathan Demme, Jim Isaac, Antoine Fuqua, and Tim Robbins, Danny Glover, Maya Jupiter, Aloe Blacc, Chuck D and Common. 

Described by Cornel West as "an artist who speaks his truth with a power we desperately need to hear," his work lives at the intersection of art and justice — using the stage and the classroom to build community, critical literacy, and connection both inside and beyond the prison system.

Poet

Actor

Educator

Scholar

Artist

Writer

Prison Activist

Harry Belafonte and Bryonn Bain