Expressive Arts and Social Change

Please arrive early so you don’t miss anything as the event will begin promptly at 4:30. Refreshments and art supplies will be provided. We look forward to seeing you there!

About our panelists:

• Rogério Meireles Pinto is University Diversity & Social Transformation Professor, Berit Ingersoll-Dayton Collegiate Professor of Social Work, and Professor of Social Work, Theater & Drama, and Art & Design. He uses art-based methods to conduct community-engaged research in the United States and Brazil, developing strategies and interventions to help racial/ethnic and sexually minoritized groups. His performance, Marília, won the United Solo Festival Best Documentary Script in 2016. Pinto’s multimedia art exhibition, Colorism, is on view at the Duderstadt Center Gallery.

• Deborah Gordon-Gurfinkel is the founding director of Telling It. Her practices center around the social & emotional learning and healing of children in under-served communities in Washtenaw County through expressive arts and games, including creative writing, visual arts, and theater. She teaches “Community Empowerment through the Arts” at the Residential College. 

• Becca Pickus a lecturer in the Social Theory and Practice (STP) Program, where she teaches writing and seminars - both inside prisons and on campus - about restorative and transformative justice; decarceration activism; arts-based, trauma-responsive, and healing-centered practice; critical pedagogies; and abolition. She is an RC alumna and received her MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Her clinical interests include psychodynamic and attachment theory; play therapy; and trauma, grief, and loss.

• Megan Holmes is a Professor Emerita of Art History and on the Faculty of the U-M Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP). Her scholarly interests include Early Modern Italian social history of art, miraculous images and image cults, and popular religion. Her pedagogy emphasizes open-ended collaborative inquiry, experiential learning, and community building.  For PCAP she teaches the course “Visual Art and Incarceration,” facilitates art workshops in Michigan prisons, participates in the annual art exhibition, and serves as a member of the Executive Committee.

• Kelly Kundrat is the Lead Social Worker of Telling It and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LMSW) in the State of Michigan at large. She attended the University of Michigan for her Master of Social Work and American University for her Master of Arts in Public Anthropology. Kelly is passionate about social justice through critical consciousness-raising, education, and advocacy.