Bryonn Bain

Bryonn Bain is an American poet, actor, prison activist, scholar, author, hip-hop artist and professor of African American Studies and World Arts & Cultures in the School of the Arts and the School of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

His one-man show, Lyrics From Lockdown, won "Best Solo Performance" from the LA Weekly and NAACP. Executive-produced by Harry Belafonte,, later Ron Simons, Rob Reiner, and Gina Belafonte, among others, the show tells stories of wrongful incarceration—including Bain's and his close friend Nanon Williams'—through spoken-word poetry, hip-hop theater, calypso, comedy and classical music. Its latest iteration was performed at the Academy Museum in 2025. Bain founded the Prison Education Program at UCLA in 2015. In 2019, the program and his performances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts were featured on the debut episode of LA Stories, which won an Emmy Award. Bain hosted My Two Cents, a current affairs talk show on BET, for five consecutive seasons, and starred in Pig Hunt, the last film directed by Academy Award-winner James Isaac. A Tony-nominated theater maker, Bain was a producer of the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange's classic For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.