Short Biology (redacted)

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PROLIFIC

Brandt Maina | RIOA wa ROE (they/he) is a Kenyan writer and artist based in Portland, Oregon sublimating autobiography into plays, poetry, installation, drawing, performance, and abstracted narrative forms. Raised in Nairobi and formally trained in acting, opera, instrumental performance, and dance, their current practice emerged through a writing process that compels them to harvest souvenirs of migration, queer survival, and Afrodiasporic displacement. There are parallels between worlds where only those who've crossed many seas may see.



Their work welcomes audiences into the intimate interstices of their soul through a broken language left behind after the theft of an Agikuyu's mother tongue. Relive that again. English. Where the orchestral acoustic architecture of those newly colonized lips and teeth bite into gesture and symbolism while the emotions of Good Screaming are extruded into auroras of auditory color and light. Fragmented nonlinear storytelling. Maina's language flies far beyond the regurgitation of bezoars. Instead, the work ululates inside romance, absurdity, tenderness, rituals of innocence, of Peace and Bliss and Love, and Chaos as blooming mother.



Brandt invokes forms of freedom that feel primordial, ancestral, and child-like —spaces where the flesh may soften enough to remember itself again. This expansion became Succinct Suppositions: an ongoing cycle of nine absurdist plays presented in submersive environments swirling with drawings, suspended paper forms, photographs, sounds, handwriting, and sculptural interventions. He shoves his fingers into and combs through Black abstraction, African migration, the varied sounds of breathing, and the spiritual residue carried by spaces, bodies, and objects. Their writing asks what becomes possible when abstraction dares to hold the portrait of a melanated psyche without relying on figuration or mimetic representation. What happens when the words spoken in a play sound like a water park? When a stage becomes a temple and storytelling becomes a way of bribing consciousness back into the body?

Ongoing Projects (redacted)


Currently, 

right at this very moment,

1. 

RIOA wa ROE is editing the SpringSummer2023 collection of 9 short plays, Succinct Suppositions. He is systematically editing and workshopping the scripts and sharing this collection as exhibitions and staged readings performed in Portland, Oregon

Play No. 1: Bard Bird - Performed at Portland Center Stage in Spring 2023
Play No. 6: Burnt Bread - Performed at Portland Center Stage in Summer 2023 JAW Festival

Play No. 2: Baby Buddy - Performed at ILY2Too in Summer 2024
Play No. 3: Mother Daddy - Performed at ILY2Too in Summer 2024
Play No. 5: MoonBloom - Performed at Shaking the Tree Theater in Summer 2024

Play No. 4. After Before - Performed at Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center June 2026
Play No. 7. Angel Swords - Performed at Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center June 2026

Subscribe for updates on SpringSummer 2026 performances

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2. 

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Brandt will produce a tv pilot

for a series on their experience of the postmodern American dream

as an international student studying musical theater
at a conservative Christian school
in rural Indiana
between 2016 - 2020
Comedy, Drama, Ballet in the cornfields, Forbidden QQQQQ romances, 
Wong Kar-Wai meets Justin Simien

 

3. 

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Like a frog on a chicken egg
They are brooding over the first two plays they wrote,

Occasionally Other People Come In (2021)

and

The Blooming CHAOS if a Hot Summer (2022)

 

4. 

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And composing and developing ethereal tri-lingual wailings on a 5 string guitar for an album titled, “she broke my G string”, 

He plays them every night
 

all the while.... 

 

5. 

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Meticulously cataloging and finding gallery spaces for more than 8 collections/series of drawings documenting their experience as an IIIIIIIII applying for AAAAAA status over the past five years, 

 

July 2021 to…

HERE,
NOW

RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW

 

6. 

And of course, there’s all the photography and video documentary – lordy me oh my
With more to come, me oh my, 

 

An archivist with 438GB of performances by Portland-based artists of varying melanation 

 

And, and

She’s hoarding, HOARDING, 16 rolls of 35mm film from these same past two years
Some developed, some undeveloped 

All of it
JUICYYYYYYYY!!! Girl, JUICY! 
 

7. 

Anyway, girl

Andy Worhol is a whale, girl 

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8. 

Brandt Maina
RIOA wa ROE

Is a Prolific Artist

And, yes yes yes
the Confidence in the calm of Her smile is Her charm

the Crystalline Clarity and Certainty of His vision
 

9. 

LAVA MOVING AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT

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Brandt also goes by the name RIOA wa RIOE 
 

[Ri-Oh-Ah wah Ri-Oh- Ei] 
 

RIOA for short. 

The name means “Sun from the River” in Kikuyu.  

 

🌞🤲🏽

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I also identify as an absurdist clown and would remind us all that we need not take ourselves too seriously. Formalities are for fools and egos for Kanye. 

 

Welcome to my digital journal
Delve as deep as you wish
All who return must leave an offering for the unknown gods
Good Luck 

- All my love and light