Creativity, Art, and Leadership in Prison and Beyond

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 5, 2024 | 6:00pm EST

Location: In-person at Sever Hall, Room 113, 25, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA, 02138

About the Event

This event will bring together formerly incarcerated artists and writers to explore the relationship between making art and creating change, both within prisons and outside the walls. The panel will feature Eric Christo Martinez, Russell Craig, and Morgan Godvin, and will be moderated by Elizabeth Hinton.

About the Speakers

Eric Christo Martinez is an artist, curator, writer, entrepreneur, and advocate based in Albuquerque, NM

Russell Craig is a visual artist and co-founder of the Right of Return Fellowship. A self-taught artist who survived nearly a decade of incarceration after growing up in the foster care system, Craig creates art as a means to explore the experience of overcriminalized communities and reassert agency after a lifetime of institutional control.

Morgan Godvin is a journalist, advocate, editor, and drug policy researcher. She is the Content & Community Engagement Manager at ITHAKA and the founder of Beats Overdose.

Elizabeth Hinton is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States.

Convened by Thomas Dichter, Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative, the Educational Justice Institute at MIT, the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, the Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, the Prison Studies Project, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School. It is part of the Abolition series which examines how the humanities – history, language, storytelling, and the imagination – informs the activism and vision of movement leaders.

Cover image: “Last One Done in a Cell” by Vincent Nardone, courtesy of the artist and the CPA Prison Arts Program