Click play to listen. Recorded on November 7, 2010.
In the late 1980s, while working in the San Francisco County Jail, actor and performance artist Rhodessa Jones recognized that female inmates often responded to incarceration with feelings of guilt, depression, and self-loathing. Blending social activism and theater, Jones and her theater company Cultural Odyssey founded the acclaimed Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women to learn whether an arts-based approach could help reduce female recidivism. Jones brings her story to the Festival stage and talks about 25 years of working with women in the California prison system and of her recent outreach to female prisoners in South Africa.
This program is presented in partnership with the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, Columbia College Chicago.
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