The First Time I Saw Me: Underground Rainbow Experiment Emerging Artist Showcase

The First Time I Saw Me Showcase centers the journeys of self-love for Black Trans people, exploring how self-care and community care become acts of resilience and transformation. Thematic arcs are inspired by the written production TFTISM that will premiere in September 2026.

The theme is divided into five parts:

The First Fracture
Recognizing the first parts of ourselves that others deemed unacceptable (Blackness, transness, disability, etc.).

Seeking Connection
Finding understanding through connection to ancestors and those who came before.

Honoring Past Selves
Acknowledging and celebrating past iterations of ourselves.

Sustaining Self-Love
Maintaining self-worth in a world that challenges it.

Extending Love to Community
Transforming self-love into care for others, building collective resilience.

Join us as we transform struggle into beauty and beauty into collective empowerment. 

The Underground Rainbow Experiment

The Underground Rainbow Experiment (URE) was founded on June 19, 2021, in Baltimore by Djérae Lucas, a Black trans-masculine artist and cultural organizer, as a creative space for QTBIPOC artists to learn, heal, and create beyond systems of extraction and surveillance. After years in arts administration, Djérae recognized a critical gap: organizing spaces often lacked creativity and joy, while arts institutions were disconnected from community care and movement-building. In 2022, after relocating to California and supporting their sibling, Kaj Rae, through barriers to housing access, the realities of anti-Black and anti-trans discrimination became even more apparent. These experiences reshaped URE into more than an arts organization—it became a living infrastructure of care, space, and opportunity. Today, URE operates as a solidarity-based ecosystem dedicated to building sustainable futures for Black Trans and Gender Nonconforming artists nationwide.

Artist Biographies
Djérae Lucas

Djérae Lucas (he/they), born and raised in Laurel Maryland, has been a musician (singer and composer) for twenty years and has worked in the non-profit sector for eight years. Djérae merges their knowledge of their artistic practice and arts administration skills to create and support art that sparks community experiences and encourages connection, remembrance, healing, reclamation, and love.

shah noor hussein

shah noor hussein is an award-winning Sudanese writer, multimedia visual artist, and public scholar crafting narratives at the nexus of Black feminist thought and Queer diaspora studies. shah is a Cota-Robles Scholar and Presidents Fellow in the Departments of Anthropology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. shah’s creative writing has been published in numerous anthologies, including When We Exhale (2025), As of Late (2021), and Color Theory (2019). shah's poetry appears in magazines and journals such as Southern Cultures (2025), The Arrow Journal (2023), Fog Lifter Press (2022), LA Review of Books (2020), and Umber (2019). They have performed their work at the Museum of the African Diaspora (2020 - 2022), Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (2018), and Eastside Arts Alliance (2017). shah’s art practice engages communities in projects that speak to the diverse issues they encounter, empowering their narratives through playful, magical, and healing modalities.

Bobbi Kindred (Cierra Green, Bobbi Kindred, Jolinda’s Baby, and Storyteller)

Cierra Green, Bobbi Kindred, Jolinda’s Baby, and Storyteller, because there are multiple beings that exist within them, and they must honor them all. Storytelling is how they honor the wounds within themself that still gape, and how they invoke the spirit of their ancestors’ tongue when they share communally. Storytelling since the age they were given a moving body and loud mouth, they draw on the repository of their mind, spirit, and ancestral guidance to curate the stories they choose to share and they deeply believe in the power of storytelling to heal the inner child. Their love for the literary and the poetic has led them to their career of being an English Professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio. And though they are growing new roots in the South, they are an Oakland Native, and Oakland is where they return whenever they need to be placed back in proper context. On this day, they will be sharing excerpts from their first published book, This (Boi)yant Body: Narratives of a Black Queer Boi and the waters that carry them.