#HALTSolitary

For Broadway Advocacy Coalition’s Theater of Change course at Columbia Law School, I co-facilitated a theater piece with (not for) the brilliant organizers at #HALTSolitary who are fighting diligently to abolish solitary confinement (and mass incarceration) across New York State, as well as Columbia Law School students, and theater artists. Using devising techniques like puppetry and improv, we created vignettes about implementing solitary confinement for legislators in Albany and NYC DoCCS, as well as using legal research, trauma-informed interviewing, and powermapping to develop a rigorously researched engagement strategy for the piece. Most gratifying was our final vignette, where law students, advocates, and theatermakers alike toasted a future without solitary confinement and prisons.

📍 Columbia Law School

Facilitators: Sabina Sethi Unni and Caroline Golub
#HALT Organizers: Jack Davis, Lady Kathryn Williams Julien, Marvin Wade, Tyrrell Johnson
Law students: Priya Baranwal, Ruth Etiesit Samuel, Doris N Turkel
Artists: Jianing Zhao, ChelseaDee Harrison, Lisette B. Hughes