This Is Joy Bro started on a bicycle

...with rides through Berlin and poems written alongside them. With the simple act of moving through a city and noticing what was there: the light, the cold, the strangers, the grief, the unexpected beauty.

Again and again, the same words surfaced:

this is joy, bro.

This Is Joy Bro is a movement founded by Salber Lee Williams — Zimbabwean-Portuguese artist, actor, and poet — built on a radical idea: that joy is not frivolous. It is not naive. It is not something to be purchased or earned or saved for better times.

Joy is a practice of resistance. A way of surviving. A form of connection to something far bigger than ourselves.

Drawing on the intellectual lineage of Audre Lorde, Ross Gay, adrienne maree brown, and many more, This Is Joy Bro explores joy not as the absence of pain, but as what emerges alongside it, in community, in movement, in the act of paying attention to the world.