States of Incarceration Convening

I’m a writer, coach, and creative strategist who believes that storytelling and embodiment are essential tools for justice and transformation.

For over two decades, I’ve used narrative, somatics, and systems thinking to help communities and institutions heal, evolve, and thrive. My work lives at the intersection of personal transformation and social impact — cultivating spaces where people feel seen, supported, and free to imagine beyond the status quo.

As the co-founder of the Rikers Public Memory Project, I co-lead a citywide truth and healing initiative that uses oral history and public storytelling to make the case for reparative justice in New York City. Through this work, I support communities directly impacted by incarceration to shift public narratives, archive lived experience, and advocate for systems change.

Whether I’m coaching mission-driven leaders, training teams in embodied facilitation, or consulting on equity strategy, my focus is clear:
✴ to center the wisdom of those most impacted by injustice,
✴ to foster cultures of care and accountability,
✴ and to use narrative as a catalyst for collective liberation.

My work has been featured in FastCompany, Audible for Business, Stanford Social Innovation Review, HuffPost, and other national platforms. I’ve been honored as a New School Writing Democracy Fellow, a Culture Push Fellow for Utopian Practice, a TED Resident, an Aspen Ideas Fellow, and a Radical Imagination Fellow with The Laundromat Project.

Through it all, my purpose remains the same: to build spaces where healing is possible, systems can shift, and the future feels spacious again.

Dr. Omar Bah is a torture survivor, former journalist, and refugee from The Gambia in West Africa. He is also the author of the book, Africa’s Hell on Earth: The Ordeal of an African Journalist. Furthermore, Dr. Bah is the Founder and Executive Director of the Refugee Dream Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Providence, Rhode Island which provides a range of support services tailored to the needs of the refugee community. He is relentless in his pursuit of education in psychology and trauma-based care and applies this knowledge in his direct-service and advocacy work centered on the needs of underserved and underrepresented communities such as refugees and asylum seekers. Dr. Bah focused his doctoral studies on understanding how different kinds of labeling impact an individual’s leadership, posttraumatic growth, and resilience on a physiological level, and how this is useful for articulating one major piece of the complex transformative process following extreme adversity. Leveraging his own resilience, leadership, and extensive academic background, Dr. Bah continues to lead the charge for refugees in healthcare. He places special emphasis on ensuring culturally attuned and trauma-informed care for this population, who bear the brunt of the burden of neglect through lack of knowledge, access, and distrust of service providers, due to language and cultural barriers. Recognizing the gaps in existing services provided to this community, Dr. Bah spearheaded a local grassroots movement initially focused on improving housing conditions for refugees. Quickly, this grew into a larger project encompassing key social determinants of health, culminating in the establishment of the Refugee Dream Center in 2015. Dr. Bah has remained dedicated to this cause ever since and has offered dozens of motivational speeches, training seminars, and workshops on refugee, trauma, and international issues at various conferences, universities, and public fora.

Kandra Clark, MPA, joined Urban Pathways as their Director of Policy, having worked the past 15 years in the nonprofit reentry space. In her last position as the Vice President of Policy & Strategy with Exodus Transitional Community, she oversaw agency policy, advocacy and fundraising efforts. She also founded and oversaw the Exodus Women & Girls Project, as well as several other programs from experience gained through her previous employer, The Fortune Society (where she began as an intern upon her release from prison in 2011 and climbed the career ladder).

Through her work with Urban Pathways, she actively engages in several coalitions, including the Just Pay, Homes Can’t Wait, and Affordable Homes for Whom? campaigns. She is also a member of the Justice Learning Collaborative Leadership Committee, oversees the Rights, Inclusion, Safety and Equality for Unhoused Persons (RISE UP) campaign alongside Care for the Homeless, and supports nonpolice responses for individuals experiencing mental health crisis through her work on the CCIT campaign. She is an expert in networking, legislative, budget and tenant advocacy, building long-lasting relationships with elected officials and partner organizations, and fundraising.

Kandra is an alumna of College and Community Fellowship, an active member on the Campaign to Close Rikers Island with Freedom Agenda, a Just Leadership USA 2018 Leading with Conviction alumna, a Fair Chance for Housing Steering Committee member, and a Beyond Rosie’s leader and Board Member with the Women’s Community Justice Association (WCJA). Kandra is also a member of the Queens Borough Based Peer Review Team, the Closure of Rikers Island and Reinvestment Commission, and the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, aka the Lippman Commission. In addition, she works closely with the Rikers Public Memory Project where she supports facilitating community conversations with nonprofit staff and clients around their experiences either being detained/incarcerated or working on Rikers.

 Furthermore, Kandra was honored by Citizens Against Recidivism in 2016 when she received the Julio Medina Freedom Fighter Award and is a 2018 NY Nonprofit Media 40 Under 40 Rising Star awardee. She also sits on her local community board (2 terms to date) in Queens, co-chairing the housing stability and social services subcommittee.

Javier del Castillo is a bicultural communications and digital marketing strategist dedicated to advancing equity for vulnerable communities. As Communications and Outreach Deputy Director for USAID’S MIDAS program in Colombia, he drove a national campaign reaching 13 million people while managing relationships with media and international development stakeholders. He designed and implemented marketing strategies supporting initiatives that improved livelihoods for Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities. Currently, as Digital Organizing Manager at Florida Immigrant Coalition, he crafts research-backed digital content, designs paid media strategies, and drives data-driven campaign optimization to enhance organizational visibility and advance pro-immigrant advocacy. With expertise spanning digital strategy, content production, SEO, SEM, and social media across Latin American and USA markets, Javier leverages over fifteen years of experience advancing social impact through strategic communications.

Sarita is an organizer with over fifteen years of experience supporting people and communities to exercise self-determination. Her experience includes previous roles as a Senior Community Organizer with JLUSA, as the director of the Green Light District at El Puente in Williamsburg, and the East New York Farms! (ENYF) Project Director at United Community Centers. Sarita graduated from Georgetown University, and is also a graduate of the Coro Leadership New York Fellowship.

Greer Millard is the Communications Manager at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project based in Phoenix, AZ. In this role, Greer manages the Florence Project’s external communications with supporters, members of the media, and the general public. For the past five years, Greer has worked on “Detained: Voices from the Migrant Incarceration System,” an oral history project archiving the narratives of immigrants formerly incarcerated in Arizona. Detained seeks to document the experiences of people in immigration detention in Arizona and build a counternarrative about immigration detention. Outside of Detained, in her role, Greer also engages in narrative change work, advocacy, and storytelling in pursuit of a more just immigration system and world. Greer was born and raised in Portland, Maine and holds her B.A. in political science from Boston College. No matter how far away life takes her, she will always consider herself a Mainer. 

Bahiyyah M. Muhammad, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology at Howard University (HU) in the District of Columbia (DC). Dr. Muhammad is also Founding Director for the Higher Education in Prison (HEP) Programming across all three campuses at the university and the HU Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel. To date, Professor Muhammad has spearheaded HEP courses and innovative programs offered through Howard University’s Schools of Law, Divinity, Communications, Fine Arts and the College of Arts and Sciences. These graduate seminars and undergraduate classes have occurred in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the DC Department of Corrections (DCDOC), the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) and the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) detention facilities in Maryland and Washington, DC. To date, approximately one thousand howard students, alumni, faculty, incarcerated, and formerly incarcerated individuals have participated in classes inside prisons, jails and detention facilities in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Under Dr. Muhammad’s leadership, Howard University became the first HBCU to offer award winning post-secondary education to incarcerated females, males, detained juveniles and their families, simultaneously.

Most recently, Dr. Muhammad was selected as a 2020-2021 Mandela Washington Reciprocal Exchange Fellow for the U.S. Government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) and the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX). Through this fellowship, Dr. Muhammad will spend the year working with an African Leadership Fellow to expand prisoner and juvenile refugee programming in the Kingdom of ESwatini (known as Swaziland), located in Southern Africa. Specifically, Dr. Muhammad will travel to Swaziland to provide face-to-face expert consultation at Mawelawela Correctional Centre and Mpaka Refugee Camp for STEM classes and empowerment programming for detained female youth. In 2017, Dr. Muhammad served as a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. In this position, she reviewed the U.S. policy on human rights for children and helps to design new approaches to assist the U.S. government in addressing the issue. Dr. Muhammad served within the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs. Furthermore, Dr. Muhammad has been the recipient of various service awards for her engagement with correctional facilities. Most recently, she was a Featured Honoree for Voices for A Second Chance-50the Anniversary Gala and was award the Carolyn Cross Community Impact Award for her groundbreaking work with the DC Department of Corrections.

In addition, in 2018, Dr. Muhammad was awarded with the George Strawn Volunteer Award for her innovative programming and college courses offered to scholars in the DC Jail’s Correctional Treatment and Detention Facilities. Dr. Muhammad’s prison services were also awarded by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2016. She was recognized as Volunteer of the Year for her MOM Camp program that allowed children of incarcerated parents to “sleepover” at a federal prison camp with their incarcerated mothers who completed her college course, “Special Topics: Children of Incarcerated Parents”. In 2015, she received a Human Rights Award from the New Jersey Education Association, which was an advocacy award for her service to school-aged children affected by parental incarceration. This work was highlighted through the Newark Public Schools Superintendent in 2018, in the VICE of HBO Segment with Michael K. Williams, entitled “Raised in the System”, which she worked with Newark Elementary Students of the incarcerated. This film highlights success and resilience among those affected by mass incarceration and is aligned with Dr. Muhammad’s recent TED talk on this topic.

For more than a decade, Dr. Muhammad has been conducting groundbreaking research on the children of incarcerated parents and the consequences of parental incarceration on children. Dr. Muhammad has done hundreds of interviews with affected children and parents in the United States, Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. She has published research on the impact of parental incarceration – from witnessing a parent’s arrest by police to the physical and emotional separation resulting from actual incarceration – on children, their parents, and familial bonds, as well as children’s success stories. Dr. Muhammad is co-founder of Project Iron Kids, an initiative to educate and empower children of incarcerated parents. She co-published the first coloring book for children of the incarcerated, titled The Prison Alphabet: An Educational Coloring Book for Children of the Incarcerated. Her work has been translated in Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and French. In addition, Dr. Muhammad is the author of two criminal justice textbooks, has a co-authored book Credible Messenger Mentors in D.C. in production with Temple University Press. Her most recent co-edited anthology, “Social Revolution: Black Children of Incarcerated Parents Speak Truth to Power” (Routledge Press), challenges the field to explore the positive experiences among children affected by parental incarceration. She has also co-edited “Mothering From The Field” (Rutgers University Press), that explores motherhood at the intersection of field research. Her scholarship has been published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Social Problems, the Peabody Journal of Education, Journal of Criminal Justice and Law Review, the Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, the Mother Studies Journal, and the American University Business and Law Review.

Dr. Muhammad has served as an invited speaker inside prisons, jails and detention centers around the world. Her research, innovative programming, study abroad enrichment sessions and college courses have exposes students to global issues of imprisonment in Africa, Asia, Europe, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America. Dr. Muhammad is an innovative educator that utilizes a radical pedagogy to engage students in an intellectual journey that is described as, “empowering”, “transformative”, “critical” and “freeing”. Her classes have been dubbed the “Dr. Muhammad Experience” and have won her the title of Professor of the Year 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019. In addition, Dr. Muhammad voluntarily lived in a cell for a weekend (January 15-17, 2016) to gain a more holistic understanding of life behind prison walls. Dr. Muhammad is a unique educator working strategically to change the landscape of higher education, as it is known today. Dr. Muhammad was recently nominated for the very prestigious Global Teachers Prize for her groundbreaking instruction. Professor Muhammad’s newest revolutionary course, the only of its kind in the world, Policing Inside Out initiated through a partnership with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, brings together law enforcement officers and black millennials to engage in brutally honest dialogue, trust building excursions and critical readings on minority community-police relations. Now offered at Morgan State University and Coppin State

University, Policing Inside Out has transformed the ways in which inter-departmental law enforcement agencies police in Black communities. Prior to Dr. Muhammad’s academic tenure, she served as Director of the College Bound Consortium (CBC), a HEP program founded in 2010 to educate incarcerated persons in New Jersey. The CBC was facilitated at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCF) in Clinton, NJ through a partnership between Drew University, Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) and the Drew Theological School’s Partnership for Religion and Education in Prison (PREP). During this time, Professor Muhammad taught classes at EMCF and Northern State Prison (NSP) and arranged for faculty across both campuses to teach a variety of courses to approximately 200 incarcerated women in New Jersey.

Dr. Bahiyyah M. Muhammad received her B.A. in Administration of Justice with a minor in Psychology and a Criminology Certificate from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. She received her M.A. in Corrections Administration from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice with a specialization on children of incarcerated parents was received from Rutgers University, School of Criminal Justice in Newark, New Jersey. Professor Muhammad has taught courses at The New School-Urban Studies Department, West Chester University-Department of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University-School of Criminal Justice and currently serves as a tenured faculty member at the Howard University.

Enrique A. Orozco-Perez is the Co-Executive Director of Compañeros: Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center, committed to advancing the rights and well-being of immigrant communities. Growing up in a first-generation immigrant family from Colombia, he brings both lived experience and a global perspective sharpened through extensive travel.

Enrique was part of the first cohort of the Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing (CoHLI), an 18-month leadership experience supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that applies the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation framework to advance racial and health equity. He is also a current Boettcher Foundation “Doers & Difference Makers” Fellow, a nine-month program that elevates community champions across Colorado who are transforming their communities through action-oriented leadership.

Enrique’s academic background, ethical grounding, and personal experiences fuel his passion for social justice and equip him to navigate complex societal challenges. Outside his professional role, he is an avid cyclist and soccer enthusiast, believing strongly in the power of physical activity to foster community, connection, and well-being. His life and work reflect a dedication to building a just, inclusive society where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

Sally Pillay is Director of the Mami Chelo Foundation.  She is a native of South Africa who is an anti-apartheid and a progressive activist for immigrants rights. Sally’s commitment to immigrant rights began in 2008, baring witness to the impact prolonged isolation has on the psyche of immigrants in detention instilled in her a passion to continue to fight to end the incarceration of immigrants and asylum seekers. She obtained her MSW in International Community Development, with a focus in Human Rights and Social Justice. Sally believes that we all have a responsibility -moral ethical responsibility- when we see injustices to stand up and raise our voices.

Sammy Quiles is a directly impacted advocate, organizer, and policy strategist with over seven years of experience confronting racialized incarceration, state violence, and the criminalization of Black and Brown communities. Grounded in lived experience, Sammy advances trauma-informed, person-centered support for people navigating mental health challenges, using trust-building, truth-telling, and stigma-reduction as tools for survival and collective liberation. Sammy holds a bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice, works within an alternative-to-incarceration program in the Newark Municipal Court, and serves on the New Jersey Department of Corrections Board of Trustees. A founding member of the NJ Coalition to Treat NJ Kids Like Kids, Sammy organizes to dismantle punitive systems, end the incarceration and criminalization of youth, and shift power away from punishment and toward community-based care, accountability, and healing.  

Mary Rizzo is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. She works at the intersection of inclusive public history, digital humanities, urban studies, and 20th century U.S. cultural history. She is a co-founder of the Chicory Revitalization Project, which uses the black community poetry magazine Chicory to spur intergenerational dialogue on place and social justice. In 2026, University of Iowa Press will publish Baltimore’s Black Arts Then & Now: Behind the Scenes of a Collaborative Public Humanities Project, written by her and several collaborators. She is also the author of Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) and Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle (University of Nevada Press, 2015).

Shannon Ross is the CEO/Founder of The Community, which employs deep in-reach and outreach to help bring society and the system-impacted community exactly where they need each other to be. Since his release in 2020, after 17 years in prison, Shannon has become a Founding Partner of Paradigm Shyft, a Multidimensional Justice Solutions firm; an Ed Trust, Rockwood, and Represent Justice alumn; consultant with Marquette University’s Higher Education in Prison program; and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee’s Masters in Sustainable Peacebuilding program.

Melissa Radcliff has been with Our Children’s Place (OCP) of Coastal Horizons based in Wilmington, North Carolina since February 2007. OCP is a statewide education and advocacy program focused on community support for children of incarcerated and returning parents. She has worked in the area of victim services since the 1990s at a domestic violence agency, rape crisis center, prosecutor’s office, and police department in Rhode Island, Arizona, and North Carolina. She is currently overseeing the FRESH (Family Re-Entry Support and Help) program in 14 re-entry prison facilities. Melissa has extensive experience working with correctional facilities, community organizations, and other entities to develop opportunities for children to connect with their incarcerated parents and generate community support for the children whose parents are incarcerated or being released.

She has presented (in person and virtually) at the local (individual schools and school districts, county social service offices, and Smart Start programs, etc.), state (statewide conferences for afterschool programs, school social workers and counselors, Head Start and Early Head Start, among others), and national (Smart Start, national TASC, National Organization for Victim Assistance) levels to teachers, school counselors, social workers, nurses, social services professionals, afterschool and child care providers, school resource officers, treatment professionals, and Adult Correction and Juvenile Justice staff.

Anisah is a directly impacted woman of color, who has held several leadership roles in coalitions and campaigns to dismantle the criminal legal system in New York State. She currently holds a 

position as Founder and CEO of AAS Empowerment LLC, she leads directly impacted women in organizing and empowers them to use their voice in advocacy. Anisah is currently the National Coordinator for the Unlock the Box Campaign, where she provides technical assistance to 23 states working to end solitary confinement in state and federal facilities. She is also volunteering to manage and organize the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls.

Anisah formerly coordinated several campaigns and coalitions across New York City and the  State, just to name a few: Campaigns Against Isolated Confinement (CAIC) People’s Campaign for Parole Justice (PCPJ) Coalition for Women Prisoners (CWP) Campaign to Move to End Violence against Women (MEV)

Anisah formerly Coordinated for the Coalition of Women Prisoners at STEPS to End Family Violence’s Centering Survivor’s Advocacy Project. In her role, she built the coalition’s capacity throughout communities impacted by violence and the legal system and supported impacted women & girls in leadership roles, with legislative advocacy. Passing the DVSJA in 2019. Before joining STEPS, Anisah held the position of Project Associate for the Correctional Association’s (CANY) Women in Prison Project, a position she has held since 2014. As Project Associate, Anisah engaged in prison monitoring and policy advocacy, worked on legislative campaigns, coordinated the Coalition for Women Prisoners, and conducted community outreach and public education activities. Anisah is a long-standing member of the Coalition for Women Prisoners and the former co-chair of the Coalition’s Re-Entry and Conditions of Confinement Committee. 

Before joining the CANY, Anisah worked at the Center for Court Innovation’s Harlem Community Justice Center as a Case Manager. She also held the position of Parole Reentry Court  Family Engagement Coordinator. She has an Associate Degree in Liberal Arts from LaGuardia Community College and plans to continue her education in public policy. Anisah is currently a member of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls; working in collaboration with other formerly incarcerated professional women and girls to challenge the criminal legal system to treat women more humanely by not using incarceration as the answer to our social and economic injustices faced in our communities. 

Anisah has spent eight years as a lead organizer in the HALT-Solitary Campaign, until getting the  legislation passed, in 2020 and continues to work in coalition on criminal justice reform and conditions to support incarcerated women and girls. 

Anisah sat on the Advisory Committees for the Novo’s Foundation Women’s Building from 2016-2020. The Women’s Building is an old women’s prison that was being transformed into the Women’s Building of resources and safe spaces for women and girls. 

Anisah sat on the New York Women’s Foundation Justice Advisory Committee, from 2019 -2023 as the Justice Fund Advisory member which helped to fund organizations that work on systemic change in NYC surrounding the campaign to close the women’s jail at Rikers Island. Anisah also sits on the North Star Fund’s Community Funding Committee, where she reviews grant applications for the funders. As a member of all the foundation’s advisory committees, Anisah uses her lived experience and her experience working on criminal justice reform to help shape what could become the repurposing of prisons and jails for women and girls along with funding for the organization in NYC and NYS. 

Anisah is also an alumnus of the Move to End Violence’s fourth cohort and has been engaging with movement makers from across the globe to end violence against women and girls. In 2020 Anisah joined the Survivors Justice Project, which tracks and supports individuals with the opportunity to use the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act Law, which she led the advocacy for the new law. 

In 2022 Anisah was invited to advise a group of music executives; The Universal Music Group Task Force seeks guidance and direction from individuals close to the solutions of the problem. Staying focused on communities of color that are impacted by lack of access to healthcare, housing, mental treatment, and justice. 

Outside of her activism, Anisah holds a Board of Director position with Tools & Tiara- a nonprofit organization teaching young women & girls the construction trade, empowerment, and self-sufficiency through trades work. 

Anisah founded the AAS Empowerment LLC which is her own LLC where she engages individuals, organizations & campaigns on power building and social justice reforms & activism. She is an Activist, Advocate, and an Abolitionist.

Calvin John Smiley, Ph.D. is an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College-CUNY.  He is the co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home (Routledge, 2020), author of the award-winning Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023) as well as author of Defund: Conversations Towards Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024). He is co-author of Prison Hashtags: Incarceration, Reentry, and Digital Identity, scheduled for publication in fall 2026 (NYU Press). Finally, Smiley has published in an array of peer-reviewed journals and public outlets as his research and scholarship broadly focus on issues related to justice, inequality, and race.

Beyond academic work, Smiley is committed to public sociology and praxis as a regular contributor to several news and talk show outlets and the founder and director of Till Everything Better LLC, which works with system-impacted youth in New York City youth detention facilities. Smiley is the Faculty Fellow for the CUNY New Paths and Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) program to offer system-impacted youth college-credit courses and is the co-director for the inaugural Impact Justice Center at Hunter to assist system-impacted students. For more information about Smiley’s research, service, and teaching, please visit: www.cjsmiley.com 

David Taylor’s artwork examines place, territory, history and politics. Exhibited internationally, his projects reveal how borders can function not only as spatial demarcations, but also as an amplifying device particularly attuned to geo-political, environmental and social conditions. Pursuing projects that chronicle the changing circumstances of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, he was awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and has released two monographs–Working the Line (Radius Books, 2010) and Monuments: 276 Views of the United States – Mexico Border (Radius Books and Nevada Museum of Art, 2015). His artwork is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Nevada Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the MFA Houston. Widely published, Taylor’s projects have been featured in outlets such as Art LTD., The Guardian, The New Yorker blog, Politico, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Places Journal, PREFIX PHOTO, Fraction Magazine, the Mexico/Latin America Edition of Esquire Magazine and Arquine. Exhibition venues include the The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, the MCA San Diego, the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington DC, Museo de las Artes Universidad de Guadalajara, Oficina de Proyectos Culturales, MFA Houston, Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Boise Art Museum.

Most recently, Taylor was awarded a 2019 residency at Proyecto Siqueiros: La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a 2019 Arizona Commission for the Arts Research and Development Grant and the 2023 Tucson Museum of Art Contemporary Art Society Prize. His essay “Refuge and Fortification” was published in the journal PLACES in 2020. In 2022 his collaborative work with Marcos Ramírez ERRE was recognized by Monument Lab and traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the exhibition Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea in 2023-24. His ongoing work documenting the industrialization of borderland security regimes was presented in a solo exhibition at Pidgin Palace Arts and a screening at UnionDocs. In the fall of 2026 Museo de Arte de Sonora will mount a major exhibition to coincide with Fotoseptiembre.

Taylor joined the faculty of the University of Arizona School of Art in 2013 with over 16 years of teaching experience.

Dr. Breea C. Willingham is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University at Buffalo and brings over two decades of experience in teaching, research, and academic leadership. Before entering academia, Dr. Willingham spent ten years as a newspaper reporter covering crime, murder trials, and education in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Upstate New York. Her research is deeply informed by her personal experience as the sister and aunt of two men serving life sentences, and by a broader commitment to confronting racial and gendered injustice. Dr. Willingham’s scholarship centers mass incarceration’s impact on Black families and the role of trauma in shaping Black women’s experiences within the criminal legal system. Her work on incarcerated fathers and their children, Black women’s prison narratives, teaching in women’s prisons, and police violence against Black women has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.

Dr. Willingham has presented her research at academic conferences across the United States and internationally, and has delivered lectures at universities in the U.S. and the U.K. She has also facilitated writing and reentry workshops in both women’s and men’s prisons, and regularly shares her expertise on race, gender, crime, and higher education in prison through webinars,
panels, and podcasts.

She served as the inaugural Managing Editor of the Journal of Higher Education in Prison, the first scholarly journal dedicated to publishing research on prison education. She is also the editor of Punishment and Society, an anthology she curated for educators teaching about the broader societal ramifications of incarceration.

Dr. Willingham is currently completing two book projects: Black Feminist Disappearance Theory: A Critical Framework for Confronting the Erasure of Black Women and Girls, under contract with Routledge, and Black Women in Higher Education in Prison, under contract with Lexington Books.