Beginning in 2020, shah noor and Ruby Mountain collaborated on a series virtual sound meditations and healing gatherings focusing on their complimentary Arab and Afro-diasporic spiritual practices and combined experiences as audio engineers.

In May 2020, they released a professionally recorded version of their sound meditations on Band Camp for streaming and purchase. Listen to it here!

shah and Ruby have many previous creative collaborations, including performances at Flight Deck in Oakland and musical recordings on Ruby’s first digital album Full Moon, featuring an opening track, “Eye Remember,” by shah noor.

shah noor reads excerpts from their chapter "In the Quiet Dignity" in the anthology Color Theory edited by Vreni Mitchell-Castillo (Chhoti Maa) & Maya Gomez. The book launch was held on May 11th, 2019 at CRTL+SHFT Collective in Oakland, California. Here, shah is introduced by Chhoti Maa, their book editor and dear friend. The book features many other (queer) womxn of color artists and is available for purchase at Wolfman Books in downtown Oakland. Support local artists!

Black GRRRL Healing (2015 - 2018) was a multimedia project spanning many disciplines both academic and artistic. The multi-year creative endeavor began with a mixed-media poetry anthology released in 2016. The release included a limited-run of hand-sewn zines accompanied by a mix tape featuring shah’s recitation of the poetry over ambient and soothing instrumental beats. The collection was featured in number of artist residencies at galleries and storefronts, including Regina’s Door (2015), PIF Gallery (2016), and Omiroo (2017).

The project also lived a simultaneous life in the research and scholarly work that would lead to shah’s Masters Portfolio in the Spring of 2017. This book-length thesis featured interviews from three Black women living and working in Oakland who’s lifework embodying the Black feminist praxis of care and healing towards liberation. The portfolio also included theoretically grounded research papers, which have been published in the anthologies Color Theory (2019) and The Black Aesthetic (2017). Finally, the project included multimedia aspects such as one experimental audio podcast and two short film productions.

That same year, shah was interviewed for a project in conjunction with the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California.

While the project has been archived and is no longer available to the public, its impact live on as the foundation for shah’s current research, tentatively title Black GRRRL Rising.

The Subversive Studies podcast hosts conversations with scholars, writers, and artists whose work subverts the dominant paradigm. It serves a sa platform to discover people who are interested in disrupting conventional norms and ideologies and creating new ways of thinking about, being in, and understanding the world.

In episode 6, Dan & shah noor discuss creative inquiry as magic through the following lenses: creativity as self-making and world-making, anthropology and activism, decolonizing anthropology, queer black feminism, free-writing, autoethnography, and how creative or magical approaches to knowledge production can further empower marginalized communities. Join them on the exciting journey!

In 2018, Sasha Kelley, Queens D.Light and shah noor facilitated a conversation on Black Mental Health at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). In response to calls for racial and social justice across the world, we revisited our past conversations on Black community, art, and the ethics of care through prompts relating to our notions of "sanity", "spirit" and community healing.