Film & Art
"We are change agents. We've made change in ourselves, we've made change in our community, and those changes we've made in our community in prison actually reached outside the prison."
Co-Director and Co-Founder, Center for Justice at Columbia University
Prison Programs
WJP has coordinated the Expressive Arts & Write to Heal Programs at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility since 2024, and at Taconic Correctional Facility since 2025. These sister programs are co-designed and co-facilitated by women leaders with personal knowledge of incarceration in NY’s prisons, and our team includes social workers who offer additional support. Our goal is to provide a supportive space where participants can learn not only the skill of creative techniques but also how to engage those techniques – art, writing, dialogue – as potent vehicles for self-expression, self-reflection, communication, personal transformation, and connection. Expressive Arts sessions are facilitated in partnership with WJP artist-in-residence Katie Yamasaki, and Columbia University’s Center for Justice facilitates Write to Heal. Learn more at insideartsny.org.
Beyond Survival
In 2024, WJP co-produced a documentary, Beyond Survival, with Kashif Incubator and in partnership with Survivors Justice Project. The film tells the story of the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA), New York’s groundbreaking sentencing reform and the powerful leadership of survivors in creating change. Through interviews with legislators, judges, and advocates, including survivors of abuse and long-term incarceration, the film narrates the 10-year campaign for the DVSJA and spotlights critical efforts to implement the Act. Beyond Survival won best documentary at the Imagine This Women’s International Film Festival and was an official selection at the San Quentin Film Festival where it was available to all people in California’s state prison system. WJP also published a comprehensive infographic to dovetail with the film. The film premiered on November 2, 2024, at SVA Theatre in NYC. Visit beyondsurvivalfilm.org to learn more.
After the project to transform the former Bayview prison into a Women’s Building ended in 2019, WJP created Shine On to honor the currently and formerly incarcerated women who led the transformation effort. Throughout the 4-year Women’s Building project, countless hearts were transformed, broad power was built, and a dynamic, loving community was nurtured. Produced with the Creative Bionics team, this 8-minute film is a testament to the fact that, while the building project came to a close, the leadership and vision gifted by directly impacted women will shine on forever.
WJP created this 5-minute film in partnership with Echoes of Incarceration. The film highlights the experiences of children whose mothers were incarcerated in New York, perspectives that are often overlooked and devalued. The film draws its title from the insight of one child who shared, “I was feeling mad when my mom went away because I missed her so much, and when she came back, I felt that I was like the sun.”
WJP produced this 7-minute film with filmmaker Chanelle Elaine and the Creative Bionics team. The film presents the story behind the Transformation event WJP organized in partnership with its Women’s Building working group on January 14, 2017 at the now closed Bayview prison in Manhattan. The piece uplifts the leadership of formerly incarcerated women in the Women’s Building project, which was ongoing at the time of the film’s creation.
WJP coordinated this piece with muralist Katie Yamasaki, WJP’s Women’s Building Working Group, and mothers and children who are part of the Hour Children community. The mural’s two vibrant 8’ x 10’ canvas panels depict women on both sides of the walls creating community and sisterhood, resisting dehumanization and confinement, and claiming their power to transform themselves and the world. Katie Yamasaki notes that the mural’s gold coloring “symbolizes the sacred, precious nature of every life on the inside,” and connects to Japanese art’s use of gold to bring light to dark spaces.
WJP created this 8’ x 16’ display, designed by artist Troy Lambert, to highlight incarcerated women’s powerful interpretations of the concept of transformation. The contributions, which include poems, art, and writings from women serving sentences from five years to 75 years to life, are woven together with a quilt motif, building on the role quilts have played in activism and storytelling.
WJP created this 8’ x 8’ interactive piece, designed by artist Troy Lambert, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements. The display honors women and gender expansive people who have lost their lives to state violence as of 2017 and draws the connection between the violence that Black, Indigenous, and people of color experience in the community and the violence they experience as a result of criminalization and incarceration.