will offer a community engagement. An embodied outdoor workshop will invite peoples’ expressions of desire and difficulties based on different participants’ direct and unique experiences of the carceral system. We will use embodied images to share our experiences with other stakeholders to create a culture of connection and empathy, and an interactive dramatic scene will be quickly devised and performed with audience interactions to create a shared critical dialogue around the issue of healing and justice.

Brent Blair joined the USC faculty in 1994 and is founder of the USC/SDA Institute for Theatre & Social Change (ITSC). Having trained in Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) with the late Augusto Boal from 1996 until his death in 2009, he has led theatre projects on healing and social justice locally and all over the world. His work is currently centered on exploring artistic resistance in anti-democratic cultures, particularly in the area of criminal justice, immigrant rights, and prison reform. He has written widely on Theatre of the Oppressed, including articles on its use with collective trauma, youth, restorative justice and healing. His partnership with David Sloane of the Price School of Public Policy and Javier Stauring of the Restorative Justice advocacy NGO Healing Dialogue & Action led to the creation of a new course Performing Policy: The Justice Projectnow in its seventh year.