Editorial Team

  • Co-Editor-in-Chief: David E. Gussak, Ph.D., Professor of Art Therapy and Director, FSU Institute for Art and Art Therapy with the Imprisoned, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida
  • Co-Editor-in-Chief: John R. Whitman, Ph.D., Principal, Creative Prisons Project, Chicago, Illinois
  • Managing Editor: Amanda (Mandy) Gardner, Ph.D., SCAN, Prison Arts Resource Project, Sandia Park, New Mexico
  • Review Editor: Jill Anderson, Assistant Director of Prisons, Jails, Reentry, and Youth Justice Services at Queens Public Library, New York
  • Lawrence Brewster, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus and former Dean, Public Policy, University of San Francisco, California
  • Annie Buckley, MFA, Professor of Visual Studies; Director, Institute for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Justice, San Diego State University, Founder and Executive Director, Prison Arts Collective, California
  • Mary L. Cohen, Ph.D., Professor of Music Education, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
  • Sarah Colvin, Ph.D., Professor of German, Cambridge University, Member, National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance, Cambridge, U.K.
  • André de Quadros, Ed.D., Professor of Music, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts
  • Davor Džalto, Ph.D., Professor in Religion, Art, and Democracy, University College Stockholm, Sweden
  • Heinz-Peter Echtermeyer, Art and Prison e.V., Berlin, Germany
  • Rand Hazou, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities Media and Creative Comm, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
  • Grady Hillman, M.A., President, Southwest Correctional Arts Network, New Mexico
  • Mina Ibrahim, Ph.D., postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Conflict Studies, University of Marburg, Germany
  • G. Roger Jarjoura, Ph.D., Independent Researcher in Criminology, Re-entry, Mentoring, Juvenile Justice, Whitsett, North Carolina
  • Bruno Lavolé, President, Art et Prison, France, Poirier Films, Paris, France
  • Inga Lavolé-Khavkina, Curator of Exhibitions, Art et Prison, France and Film Director, Half a Square Meter of Freedom, Poirier Films, Paris, France
  • Randall A. Liberty, M.A., Commissioner, Maine Department of Corrections, Augusta, Maine
  • Lateef Mtima, J.D., Professor of Law, Howard University, and Founder, Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice, Washington, DC
  • Ieshaah Murphy, J.D., Assistant Professor of Law at Howard University School of Law, Washington, DC
  • Cornelia Schmidt-Harmel, Co-founder, Art and Prison e.V., Berlin, Germany
  • Melinda Šefčić, Ph.D., Visual Artist, Researcher, and External Lecturer, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Profiles

Co-editor-in-chief David Gussak

David Gussak, Ph.D., ATR-BC, HLM has taught art therapy since 1998 and joined the Florida State University Art Therapy Program in 2002. For ten of those years, he was the Chairperson for the university’s Department of Art Education. He also provides numerous lectures and workshops for various educational programs all over the world. Dr. Gussak has more than 30 years of clinical and practical experience; this includes various forensic systems, several correctional institutions and settings. In 2025, Gussak developed and is Director of the Florida State University Institute for Art and Art Therapy with the Imprisoned (AATI).

He has presented extensively internationally and nationally on—amongst many topics––forensic art therapy and art therapy in forensic settings. Along with more than 50 journal and chapter publications, he has authored his own books, including Art on Trial: Art Therapy for Capital Murder Cases, Art and Art Therapy with the Imprisoned: Re-Creating Identity,  and, most recently The Frenzied Dance of Art and Violence (2022, Oxford University Press).

Dr. Gussak has served the art therapy community in many capacities including as Past Board Director for the American Art Therapy Association and Treasurer of the Art Therapy Credentials Board. He currently sits on the editorial review board for Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, the Arts In Psychotherapy, and is a frequent guest editor for several others. He is also the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Creativity Inside. In 2022, Dr. Gussak was granted the American Art Therapy Association’s Honorary Lifetime Member (HLM) award. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2836-6608.

Co-editor-in-chief John R. Whitman

John R. Whitman, Ph.D., teaches and consults in business and nonprofit management with a specialty in the social economy and applying educational strategies to solve social problems. He has taught at American University, Babson College, Georgetown University, Harvard University Extension School, Northeastern University, and The University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Creativity Inside and co-founder of the Museum for Black Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He has also founded companies in software development (Oakland Group, Inc.), survey research (Surveytools Corporation), and film production (Camisary, Inc.). Publications include books and articles on the social economy, social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, intellectual property, cooperatives, creativity in prisons, and library management. Dr. Whitman received his A.B. from Boston University, Ed.M. from Harvard University, and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (dissertation: Evaluating Philanthropic Foundations: A Comparative Social Values Approach, including foundations in Canada, Europe, and the United States). Dr. Whitman resides in Chicago. His latest book is Prisons of Creativity: Artistic Innovation During Incarceration (Routledge, 2025). ORCID: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0002-8286-1255.

Managing Editor Amanda (Mandy) Gardner

Amanda Gardner, Ph.D., is the co-author and co-editor of Arts in Criminal Justice and Corrections: International Perspectives on Methods, Journeys and Challenges (Routledge, 2024) as well as the co-author and curator of the Prison Arts Resource Project, an annotated bibliography of all evidence-based studies in the field of arts-in-corrections in the U.S.A. The project was funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. She is also a community arts practitioner, having facilitated creative writing workshops in a homeless shelter, prison, jail and community arts space for low-income artists. She has been the recipient or co-recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts grants. She has a PhD in interdisciplinary studies and wrote her dissertation on homeless writers, largely inspired by nine years facilitating workshops at a homeless shelter.

Jill Anderson is the Assistant Director of Jail, Prison, Reentry, and Youth Justice at Queens Public Library. She is interested in outreach, the public library as a community space, and conversations surrounding queerness. She received her Master's in Library Science from Queens College, part of the City University of New York system and her juris doctorate from Creighton University School of Law. Her co-authored book Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline: An Action Guide for Libraries (American Library Association, 2026) provides examples and best practices for working with youth before, during, and after their contact with the criminal legal system. She has also written on the performance of gender and library work, the power of hip hop at the library, and library programs inside prisons and jails. She currently co-hosts the Reentry Community of Practice for librarians and library staff that provide reentry services to their patrons.

Lawrence (Larry) Brewster

Lawrence (Larry) Brewster, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus and former dean of the College of Professional Studies and the School of Education at the University of San Francisco. He regularly consults in public policy and program evaluation, and is author of journal articles, book chapters, and books, including The Public Agenda: Issues in American Politics, 5th edition; A Primer of California Politics, 2nd edition; and Paths of Discovery: Art Practice and Its Impact in California Prisons, 2nd edition. His 1983 cost-benefit study that showed significant savings to the corrections system because of reduced disciplinary incidents among prisoners engaged in the arts became a lasting and unique contribution to the field that is often cited by researchers around the world. His 2014 evaluation of arts classes in selected California prisons was a key ingredient in the restoration of state funding for the prisons art program and has been replicated in several states around the country.

Annie Buckley, MFA, is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, professor, and the founding director of the Institute for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Justice at San Diego State University. She is also the founder and director of Prison Arts Collective, which has brought arts to over 9,500 people in 15 prisons since 2013, and VISTA (Valuing Incarcerated Scholars through Academia), the first SDSU BA offered in a state prison. Buckley's writing about contemporary art has been published widely, including nearly 100 reviews for Artforum.com between 2007 and 2015, and numerous reviews and essays for Art in America, Los Angeles Review of Books, Artillery, Craft Magazine, and more. Buckley is the author of two full-length fiction books, both published collaborative art projects, and the curator of shows including, "Disruption: Art and the Prison Industrial Complex" at Pitzer College Arts Galleries. Most recently, she edited Higher Education and the Carceral State (Routledge, 2024) and she is currently completing a book about her journey creating and leading Prison Arts Collective (Routledge, 2026). Buckley has received awards and grants including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the California State Senate. She has a BA from UC Berkeley and MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.

Mary Cohen, Ph.D., is Professor of Music Education at the University of Iowa, lead author of Music-Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices, and co-leader of the International Music and Justice Inquiry Network: IMAJIN Caring Communities. From 2009 to 2020 she led the Oakdale (prison) Community Choir. For two years (2023-2025) she co-led weekly music groups inside the Linn County Juvenile Detention Center. She now co-leads the Singing Love into Life Circle, inviting returning citizens to join the monthly singing circles. She has been a keynote presenter in Germany, Canada, Portugal, and England, interviewed by BBC3 Music Matters, and completed over 40 publications including journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings, several co-authored with currently or formerly incarcerated members of our community. Dr. Cohen received her doctorate from the University of Kansas.

Dr. André de Quadros, Ed.D., is a professor of music at Boston University with affiliations in African, African American and Black Diaspora, American, Asian, Jewish, Muslim studies, prison education, and Forced Migration. As an artist, scholar, and human rights activist, he has worked in over 40 countries in the most diverse settings including professional ensembles, projects with prisons, psychosocial rehabilitation, refugees, and victims of sexual violence, torture, and trauma. His work crosses race and mass incarceration, peacebuilding, forced migration, LGBTQ+ folx, and Islamic culture. He directs choirs and choral projects in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the United States, Israel and the Arab world, and the Mexico-US border. In 2019, he was a Distinguished Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge. Among his many honors and awards is an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne. 

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7380-7794

Davor Džalto, Ph.D., is Professor of Religion and Art, and Religion and Democracy at University College Stockholm, and President of The Institute for the Study of Culture and Christianity. Originally from Yugoslavia, his research focuses on the exploration of human freedom and creativity as metaphysical, political, as well as aesthetic concepts. As the author and editor, he published more than twenty books and over a hundred scholarly studies, essays and op-eds. Among his most recently published books are Beyond Capitalist Dystopia: Rethinking Freedom and Democracy in the Age of Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2022) and Anarchy and the Kingdom of God: From Eschatology to Orthodox Political Theology and Back (Fordham University Press, 2021). In addition to his academic work, Davor is also a practicing artist, specializing in painting and printmaking.

Peter Echtermeyer is a deacon living in Berlin and has worked as a prison chaplain for over 30 years in a high-security prison in Celle, Lower Saxony. The proposition that promoting creativity and artistic output among incarcerated individuals can positively influence their self-esteem, creativity, and social skills, and can bring social responsibility to those on the margins of society, inspired him to found the non-profit association Art and Prison e.V. in 2009, of which he remains its chairman today. The association has amassed a collection of approximately 2,000 works of "prison art" from over 50 countries on all continents. This collection is presented to a broad public through publications, exhibitions, and symposia. Peter's many years of international work, including on the board of the interdenominational International Prison Chaplains Association and other organizations, such as the Institute for Social Strategy, benefit the cooperation and networking with people and institutions whose civil society engagement is responsible for achieving humanitarian objectives and the development of innovative social strategies in an international context.

Rand Hazou

Rand Hazou, Ph.D., is a Palestinian theatre practitioner and scholar. His research explores arts engaging with rights and social justice. In 2004, Rand was commissioned by the UNDP to travel to the Occupied Territories in Palestine to work as a theatre consultant running workshops for Palestinian youths. In Aotearoa, he has led teaching and creative projects engaging with prison, aged-care, and street communities. Between 2019-2024, Rand was a researcher on the Health Research Council-funded research project, “Wellbeing and the Precariat,” exploring the lived experiences of working families experiencing poverty and the impact this has on well-being. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at Massey University, Aotearoa, New Zealand. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8753-072X.

Grady Hillman, M.A., first engaged with prison arts when he accepted a Writers-in-the-Schools (NEA) residency with the Windham School System of the Texas Department of Corrections in 1981. From 1981 to 1984 he taught creative writing for GED students ranging from illiterate to GED prep at 16 Texas prisons. He used his community service hours to conduct weekly professional writing workshops at three of the prisons. That beginning led to correctional arts on-site relationships in 30 states and five foreign countries. Hillman co-founded SCAN Correctional Arts in 1984 and currently serves as President.

Hillman has an M.A. in Anthropology (University of Texas) and conducted a Fulbright Fellowship in Peru researching Spanish and Quechua narratives (1989-90). His books and monographs include Razor Wire (poetry, Austin Book Award 1986), Return of the Inca (Quechua translations), Artists in the Community: Training Artists in Alternative Settings (1996), and Arts Programs for Juvenile Offenders in Detention and Corrections: A Guide to Promising Practices (2002). In 2023, Routledge published Arts in Corrections: Thirty Years of Annotated Publications, a selection of articles, book chapters, monographs, poetry, interviews published from 1981 to 2014.

Mina Ibrahim, Ph.D., is an anthropologist and community archivist from Cairo, and a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany (within the MeDiMi research group). His work asks how archives are made, withheld, and fought over—and what it means to build memory and justice “from below” in contexts shaped by violence, displacement, and uneven access to official records. In 2022, he completed a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at the University of Gießen. His dissertation—published as Identity, Marginalisation, Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt (Palgrave, 2022)—traces Coptic lives unfolding in “misfit” or negated spaces (including prisons and other marginalized social worlds) and examines how visibility, silence, and respectability politics shape what can be said, remembered, or archived.

In 2021, Ibrahim founded Shubra’s Archive, Egypt’s first neighborhood-based community archive, rooted in Shubra and adjacent neighborhoods in North Cairo. The archive documents everyday histories through collective storytelling, digitization, and a meta-database of family and private collections, and its learning–research programs have produced the Shubra’s Archive Logs series. Shubra’s Archive also works with the stories and damaged or lost archives of displaced Syrians, Sudanese, Palestinians, and Yemenis living in and around Shubra, and has developed Arabic toolkits that make “community archiving” usable as everyday practice.

Since 2018, he has served as coordinator and later program manager of the Beirut/Berlin-based MENA Prison Forum, curating a regional living archive that brings together former detainees, artists, and researchers through exhibitions, film screenings, and public events.

Bruno Lavolé founded the French not-for-profit organization Art et Prison France, alongside his wife Inga Lavolé-Khavkina. Art et Prison France exhibits art created behind bars, aiming to change the outlook of the public on inmates and thus to facilitate their reintegration into society. He is also a founding partner of the film production company Poirier Films, which produced the documentary movie about art created behind bars Half a Square Meter of Freedom. Previously, Bruno spent 30 years with BNP Paribas’ Corporate and Investment Banking Department working in Hong Kong, New York, Houston and London. With degrees in history, law and political science from Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, Bruno was always deeply interested in social issues. He is on the board of not-for-profit organizations in France supporting social issues related to prisoners, refugees or handicapped persons. 

Inga Lavolé-Khavkina

Born in the former Soviet Union, Inga Lavolé-Khavkina studied fine arts and medicine before moving to the United States in 1988. In New York, Inga completed her film studies at New York University, where she discovered the power of documentary filmmaking. After graduation, Inga managed the film studio at the Film and Television Department of NYU. During that time, she also worked for the Shoah Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg, where she conducted a myriad of video interviews of Holocaust survivors. Inga was also one of the founding partners of New Post House, Inc., an independent production company. It was there that she honed her art working as producer, director, videographer, and editor for a number of well-received documentary films.

Always interested in psychology and after being deeply affected by the September 11th tragedy in New York City, Inga enrolled in the IM School of Healing Arts, where she studied psychology for five years.  Her studies were based on the works of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Sigmund Freud. The application of his methodology helps patients to heal from psychological traumas and to believe in their creative potential.

After moving to Paris in 2006, Inga held the post of a creative director at a Parisian art gallery and was invited as a Jury Member for the Latin American Film Festival. In 2014, she became one of the founding members of Poirier Films, a French production company, which produced the documentary film Half a Square Meter of Freedom, which she directed. The film was completed in 2018. The same year, with her husband Bruno Lavolé, she created the non-profit organization Art et Prison, France. While promoting artistic creation in prison, the goal of this association is to build a bridge between inmates and society, and thus facilitate community re-entry of the inmates through art and culture.

Lateef Mtima is a Professor of Law at the Howard University School of Law and the Founder and Director of the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ), an accredited NGO member of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). IIPSJ advocates for core principles of socially equitable access, inclusion, and empowerment in the development and implementation of the IP ecosystem. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Professor Mtima has testified before Congress in support of legislation to promote IP inclusivity, including the Unleashing American Innovators Act, which President Biden signed into law on December 29, 2022. He is the author of numerous publications on IP law, including the co-editor/contributing author of the Cambridge Handbook on Intellectual Property and Social Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Mtima received his B.A. from Amherst College and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Ieshaah Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Law at Howard University School of Law, where she teaches Evidence, Criminal Law, and Criminal Procedure. Her teaching and scholarship examine how the criminal legal system harms Black communities and offer antiracist and abolition-informed frameworks for transformation. Before joining Howard, Professor Murphy was Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Defense and Racial Justice Clinic at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law. Under her leadership, the Clinic fought mass incarceration and racial injustice through direct representation, community engagement, and strategic action. She previously spent over a decade as a public defender and civil rights attorney, including serving as a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland and as a trial attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. At PDS, she represented hundreds of indigent clients charged with serious offenses, supervised attorneys, and co-founded the agency’s annual week-long defender training program for law students from historically excluded communities. A founding member and Training Director of the Black Public Defender Association, Professor Murphy develops and leads race-conscious training programs for defenders nationwide. She earned her B.A. from Spelman College and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Cornelia Schmidt-Harmel was born in Greifswald on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast and raised in East Berlin. She studied education with a focus on visual arts and completed her high school diploma after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She holds a degree in linguistics, German studies, and cultural studies from Humboldt University of Berlin.

Cornelia worked as a freelance artist in painting, graphic arts, and book illustration and exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2009, she co-founded the non-profit Art and Prison e.V. in Berlin.  She curates international traveling exhibitions shown in many European countries, including France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Poland. Highlights include exhibitions in Rome and Sicily under the patronage of Sophie, Hereditary Princess of Liechtenstein. Cornelia organizes art projects and competitions for incarcerated individuals. She coordinates art catalogue production and teaches art to schoolchildren using works created by prisoners. Her commitment particularly supports women with children in custody. Through art, she tries to help by strengthening self-esteem and creativity for the people involved.

Melinda Šefčić, Ph.D. is a visual artist, researcher, and external lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb. She is internationally recognized as a pioneer of socially engaged art and artistic research in prison and hospital environments, exploring the intersections of art, mental health, and social inclusion. Since 2016, Dr. Šefčić has led a series of large-scale projects focused on the aestheticization and rehumanization of prison spaces, implemented in collaboration with the Croatian Ministry of Justice and Public Administration. Through the creation of more than 100 murals in correctional institutions and accompanying research, her work demonstrates how art can foster dignity, empathy, and psychological well-being among both inmates and staff. She is the author and artistic director of the international Erasmus+ project Arts of Freedom, which produced two influential publications—A Necessity of Art in Prison and A Manual for Artists on Art in Prison—presenting a structured model for integrating art into correctional systems across Europe. Her ongoing Creative Europe project, Healing Nature–Animation for Health and Well-being in Children Hospital Environments (2024–2026), was selected as a case study in the European Commission’s publication Culture and Health – Time to Act (2025). Dr. Šefčić’s work aligns with EU and WHO cultural policy priorities, positioning art as a transformative force that bridges confinement and community, creativity and rehabilitation.