Beau Sia

Beau Sia, born Beaufort Benjamin Sia in 1976 in Ohio, is an American slam poet of Chinese-Filipino descent who appeared on Broadway in 2002 in Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam. Raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Sia first encountered spoken word poetry through MTV as a teenager. Outside of his participation on his high school swim team, he attended Oklahoma City's only open mic night. In 1995 he relocated to New York City to enroll in the dramatic writing program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He has stated that living in New York City made him aware of his identity as an Asian American in ways he had not experienced in Oklahoma City, and that cultural identity became a recurring subject in his work.

Sia began performing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and earned a place on the 1996 Nuyorican National Poetry Slam team alongside Saul Williams, Jessica Care Moore, and muMs da Schemer. The team placed third at the 1996 National Poetry Slam and was documented in the film SlamNation, in which Sia appeared as himself. He went on to win two National Poetry Slam Championships in 1997 and 2000 competing on the NYC-Urbana national poetry slam team, and reached second place in the Individual Poetry Slam competition in 2001.

After reading A Night Without Armor, a poetry collection by the singer Jewel, Sia wrote a parody titled A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge, published by Mouth Almighty Books in 1998. That same year, Entertainment Weekly reviewer Alexandra Jacobs noted the work's deadpan parodies had quickly won a following. Also in 1998, Sia released the spoken-word album Attack! Attack! Go! on Mouth Almighty/Mercury/PolyGram Records and appeared in the film Slam as the character Jimmy Huang. His subsequent publications include The Undisputed Greatest Writer Of All Time, released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2012, and White Power, released by Not A Cult in 2017. His work has been included in numerous anthologies, among them Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and Heights of the Marvelous: A New York Anthology.

Sia's screen credits span film and television across multiple decades. He appeared as a late-night comedian in The Manchurian Candidate in 2004 and as a Duane Reade clerk in Hitch in 2005. He portrayed the character Cicero in Jeremy Saulnier's 2007 directorial debut Murder Party, and played wedding emcee Norman Sklear in Rachel Getting Married in 2008. In 2015 he appeared in Ricki and the Flash and took on a recurring role in the web series Pretty Dudes alongside Dion Basco and Yoshi Sudarso. He also portrays the protagonist in the music video for Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio. In addition to his screen work, Sia collaborated with former Gearbox Software writer Anthony Burch to create the narrative for the exploration video game Failsafe.