Let me introduce myself. Hi, I'm Ms. Bria Nicole.
Don't say too many times it'll get old.
Some of you know me, but still there is so much about me you don't even see
First things first. Don't question me or who I'm about to be
layers and levels to miss things we call Brie.
Some of y'all better recognize, I am hella Oakland.
I am proud, strong, sometimes loud, but rarely ever wrong.
I am a physical representation of greatness.
Never fail to recognize my accomplishments, babe. It is all on my resume.
I am a physical embodiment of Black excellence at heart.
I'm Sagittarius Strong/My name is Ms. Bria Nicole Woodland.
Don't get it wrong.
– Let Me Introduce Myself, Ms. Bria Woodland, 2022
Women’s Foundation of California’s Summer Leadership Institute.
In the video she sent me before our interview, Bria Woodland, known to friends and family as Ms. Bria, fills the screen with presence as spoken prose creates an electric atmosphere. Her black dress, bright white jacket, and white sneakers, glow under the purple lights. As I listened to the proud voice of this young Black spoken word artist, I closed my eyes.
Herein lies the power of her young voice and vision of a Black feminist future that includes us all.
“My main cause/ is always/ the liberation of all oppressed people/ around the world we call Earth. We exist/ we exist beyond the systems of oppression they’ve attempted to internalize/ we thrive beyond the infrastructure and institutions they built to hold us down/instead we learn to carry it on our backs/ and we grow through the cracks in the sidewalks with petals and leaves and thorns/ we use it to pass water down the vine to create/ my ancestors and my God came together to produce a specimen as proud as me to remind y’all that energy never dies.”
The poem was a love letter to the cause of the Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese people, connecting the degradation of their lives by war and genocide to the attempts of white supremacy to diminish the value of Black life in America. But she doesn’t leave the analysis wringing its hands in a stranglehold of pessimism and alienation; Ms. Bria instead reminds the listener, me in this case, that there is hope, that our worth as human beings is not defined by the systems of control that shape our conditions. That there is, in fact, a dignity so inherent, it cannot be eroded, no matter what external forces may attempt.
I found myself growing more and more hopeful about the possible futures of equity, justice, and peace young Black people in Oakland might deliver.
Herein lies the power of her young voice and vision of a Black feminist future that includes us all.
Woodland’s artistic style is textured and varied, moving through diverse genres from performance art to dance and more. She pulls from her own life and the struggles of oppressed people around the world to tell stories of resilience, resistance, and hope, exploring themes of identity, trauma, and empowerment. Her performances are raw and unfiltered, inviting viewers to confront uncomfortable truths and engage in critical reflection.
to transform the culture and conditions of violence into a healing for Oakland, for California, and for the nation.
When I initially asked whether she could share some of her poetry with me in advance of getting together, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But, through both her poetry and the hour I spent speaking with her, I found myself growing more and more hopeful about the possible futures of equity, justice, and peace young Black people in Oakland might deliver.
She walked up to the Black-owned Kinfolx Coffee shop on a brightly lit Friday, the last day in February. She smiled in greeting, and it was like a sun came out. Our conversation was expansive, ranging from her family’s migration story (from Texas and Mississippi to Oakland), to her own migration within the Bay Area. We talked about the multiple mediums of art that have given her voice to transform the culture and conditions of violence into a healing for Oakland, for California, and for the nation.
Though Ms. Bria had lived in other parts of Northern California for a short period of her childhood, she claims Oakland as her hometown. “I’m from Oakland. I am fourth generation Oakland native on both sides of my family. My mom and dad’s side, both families own homes in the lower bottom.”
At just nineteen years old, Ms. Bria has already produced influential work, ranging from vibrant murals to thought-provoking performance art. She embodies the intersection of youth artistry and impactful activism, her art consistently challenging narratives, inspiring dialogue, and galvanizing action dedicated to shaping a better future for Oakland.
Through Love and through Loss
But to understand Ms. Bria’s commitment to art as resistance, you must first understand the family that shaped her. One of the most heartwarming–and heart-breaking–parts of my time with artist and activist Bria Woodland was watching her as she talked about her mother, who features as a bedrock of her artistic expression and a foundational character in Woodland’s political development.
From a very young age, Woodland’s large family infused her with Black pride, played a significant role in fostering her creativity, and encouraged her engagement with social justice. In particular, her mother instilled in her the importance of community involvement and using her voice to advocate for positive change.
“I have a big family. I have a really big village on my mom’s side alone. I have 11 aunts and uncles. Papa Stone and my great grandparents are still alive, so I try to stay very connected to them.”
Woodland’s art and politics were most profoundly shaped by the close and easy love of her tight-knit family, anchored by her mother’s love. Her mother, a social worker working with disabled youth, gave birth to Ms. Bria, her first child, as a 14-year-old high school freshman, and a second child, Malia, when Ms. Bria was 12 years old. The love that poured from Ms. Bria’s eyes when she spoke of her mother and sister revealed everything. Ms. Bria said that even as a young mother, her mom loved to write. Ms. Bria even credits her own love of the poetic written word to her mother, who is also a writer.
Ms. Bria’s mother isn’t the only member of her family that has inspired this intersection of art and activism in her life.
“I feel like my family very intentionally protected me from internalizing anti-blackness. Starting with my granny. She was very passionate about making sure my baby dolls were Black, making sure that any representation within the home was Black and it reflected us. She’s a dark-skinned Black woman, grew up in California, so I know for sure she faced her challenges in colorism and anti-blackness. And I feel like her introduction to what blackness is for me was by taking me to museums about Black history, about African history, learning about other cultures, and really connecting with black spaces. And that investment really helped protect me from viewing my blackness as something that is wrong or dangerous or harmful.”
It is from family members, particularly her grandmother, that Ms. Bria became a Pan-Africanist.
“I started hearing the term ‘Pan-African’ in middle school, high school. That foundation of accepting all blackness as blackness, and blackness not being a monolith was really important. I think it set the groundwork for when I learned about Pan-Africanism. Now I know not all skin folk are kin folk. I stand by that, ten toes down. I tell people all the time, you cannot be pro-Black if you have an exception clause within that. You cannot be pro-Black. If you’re saying accept dark skin, you cannot be Pro-Black If you’re saying ‘except gays’. I don’t think it counts for real.”
Ms. Bria’s father is a security guard who used to be deeply into tech, and inspired her to integrate the use of technology into her artistic process. Like many American families, Bria’s parents are no longer a couple, but she is clear: “I did not come from a broken home. My parents broke up. I say home is where my family is, where my parents are. That’s not broken to me because despite the fact that they are no longer together, there’s still a mutual respect and love within the space.”
But this foundation of family love existed in stark contrast to the harsh reality of state violence and injustice. A month before Ms. Bria was born, her uncle died. What the family was initially told would later prove to be a lie, and the truth would become a formative lesson about police brutality and cover-ups.
“A month before I was born, my uncle died. Up to that point in my life, I had the understanding that it was because he lost control of his motorcycle, and he crashed into a tree. In 2015, we got a lot of evidence that stated that that’s not what happened. In fact, a CHP officer was trailing him and then hit his motorcycle from behind and sent him into a park bench to a tree, and he died on site. And what we had been told before was that he was rushed to the hospital, died in the hospital. So when that came to light for me, my family held a rally, talked to me about it. He was only 33. And it definitely shaped my relationship with law enforcement, especially because…they were able to cover it up and not have to take any accountability for what happened.”
This history of loss and resistance would be tested again when Ms. Bria was in high school.
From Loss to Artistic Expression
For Black youth in Oakland, even those consciously committed to positive action through art, the future they are fighting for can seem far off. In 2018, Ms. Bria faced a crisis that would test what her family had taught her about resilience. She describes a crisis of faith she experienced in high school, just one year before the Covid pandemic. In that year, she lost a cousin, her grandfather, godmother, a classmate, and a teacher, pushing her into what she describes as “a time of self-doubt”. She continues:
“So all of that loss kind of put me in a place where I didn’t really know how to express what I felt and it kind of put me in a box. So I stopped singing as much. I kept myself active, but I wasn’t connected the way I felt I needed to be.”
Ms. Bria wasn’t alone in her grief. The Covid pandemic compounded the losses experienced by young people in Oakland and throughout the nation, displacing thousands of Black residents, taking Black lives and jobs, and increasing the precarity of life in a city already shaped by decades of racial discrimination and class inequality. From 2019 to 2023, gun violence was the leading cause of death for people under 24 in Alameda County, with Black boys and young men comprising almost 50% of gun homicide victims in Alameda County.
Drawing on the lessons her mother and grandmother had taught her about finding voice and claiming space, Ms. Bria turned to writing.
“I had carried this grief of my family members with me. I didn’t know how to work through it. I had at one point told my mom that I wanted to go to therapy, but Kaiser is Kaiser (she shrugs), and so I didn’t get those services that I needed. One night, I was like, you know what? I’m just going to write about ‘what is grief, really?’ What does it do to me? Where does it come from? Why is it here? And around that time too, I was learning about ambiguous grief and how grief is not just mourning people who died, but also mourning things that you have lost, relationships that have changed you.
After experiencing loss of loved ones, unsuccessfully attempting to access mental health services, and wondering how she could help herself and others, she turned to writing, refusing to be trapped in her thoughts. Instead, art became a vehicle for her grief, transforming her sorrow into empathy, empathy into connection, and connection into action.
Art is the Revolutionary’s Best Friend
The post-Covid grief of Black and other BIPOC youth in Oakland demands arts programs in the city that do more than keep youth busy, programs that are culturally rooted and relevant, close structural racial gaps in housing and employment, uplift suppressed narratives, and develop the leadership and organizing skills of young people most vulnerable to displacement and violence. Ms. Bria explains this beautifully:
“The funny thing about the revolution not being televised and about them erasing our history is that we missed out on or we’ve lost so much of our culture and what we’ve created. I just think about how much we do have, and then you have to multiply it by 10,000, because all of our ancestors created. Living in Oakland, the home of the Black Panthers and being able to see resistance reflected in our world and the murals, I couldn’t imagine living somewhere where we didn’t have murals. I feel like it speaks to us, it gives us a voice… Because through colonialism we’re taught that things are supposed to be one way. When it’s like, no, people are complex….and that’s why it takes more than one artist to be reflective of a community because we are all very complex. And so that’s why I believe the artist is the revolutionary’s best friend.”
Woodland has undertaken numerous art projects that have made a significant impact on Oakland. She pulls from her own life and the struggles of oppressed people around the world to tell stories of resilience, resistance, and hope to explore themes of identity, trauma, and empowerment.
In 2021, her family again experienced police violence firsthand. One evening, Ms. Bria and her step-father were sitting in the living room with her mother discussing shifts in the family living arrangement when he stepped outside for a moment. Ms. Bria described what she saw when the police arrived.
“They searched his ride with no permission, no warrant, no nothing. They said they heard a shot on the shot spotter 30 minutes prior to showing up. And when they showed up…they saw a tall black man with locks. They arrested him. Witnessing that, I was like, yeah, we ain’t on the same side, buddy. I see what the police can do.”
This experience would deepen the work she was already doing. One impactful project was a series of performance art pieces exploring the issue of police brutality. Woodland gave voice to the pain and frustration felt by many in her community, sparking conversations about police reform and accountability.
Oakland’s Future Is Black
The current landscape, while supported by civic pillars like the City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program and anchor foundations like the East Bay Community Foundation and the Akonadi Foundation, remains structurally insufficient. We see glimmers of hope in initiatives like the Belonging in Oakland: A Just City Cultural Fund, which connects artists of color with social justice organizers, but these efforts often contend with a persistent funding fragility. Long-term, unrestricted capital is scarce, and the struggle to prove the “measurable impact” of radical imagination often stalls projects that aim for deep, systemic transformation. Meanwhile, Oakland’s budget continues to prioritize the machinery of control over the infrastructure of community healing, leaving the arts sector chronically under-resourced.
This moment demands a shift from charity to genuine partnership. We must heed the fierce poetry of the street and the classroom. A revived Black Arts Movement, coupled with the unflinching clarity of youth activists like Ms. Bria, holds the power to radically redefine the narrative of Oakland. This potent combination is precisely what is needed to undermine the authoritarian drift—the surveillance, the policing, the dismissal of youth sorrow—that threatens the city’s soul.
The mandate for philanthropy is clear and uncompromising: Invest in permanence, not programs. Funders must provide the long-term, unrestricted capital that allows arts organizations serving Black youth to build generational wealth and cultural assets, cementing Black life in East Oakland through cultural hubs and co-operative ownership. They must support holistic wellness, recognizing that the grief Bria expressed demands culturally competent mental health resources alongside stages and studios.
Woodland’s artistic style is textured and varied, moving through diverse genres from performance art to dance and more. She pulls from her own life and the struggles of oppressed people around the world to tell stories of resilience, resistance, and hope, exploring themes of identity, trauma, and empowerment. Her performances are raw and unfiltered, inviting viewers to confront uncomfortable truths and engage in critical reflection.
Beyond her art, Bria Woodland is a dedicated activist deeply involved in community organizing. She works with several local organizations focused on youth empowerment, education, and social justice. Her work reflects the spirit of Oakland: resilient, vibrant, and dedicated to positive change. She embodies the potential of young people to shape their communities and challenge the status quo. As she continues her journey, Bria Woodland’s impact on Oakland will undoubtedly grow, inspiring generations to come and leaving a lasting legacy of art and activism.
