Workshop Round #1

Ready Set Resist: Using Art to Nurture Abolitionist Youth (STOP LAPD SPYING)

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community group based in the Skid Row building power toward abolition of the police state. As new national security programs deputize teachers, counselors, and students to profile young people as future criminals, Stop LAPD Spying has been learning from and working with youth in Los Angeles to develop a curriculum for organizing against surveillance in their schools and communities. This workshop will share a series of pedagogical and artistic exercises we developed to cultivate a youth culture of resistance. The curriculum uses art, theater, and youth-led research to guide participants through identifying and addressing questions surrounding mass surveillance, techno-solutionism, the intersectional harms of policing, police budget growth, and the importance for movement-building. We are hopeful this curriculum will not only deepen the audience’s understanding of abolitionist organizing but also serve as a model that can be reproduced in schools, households, playgrounds, and community spaces everywhere.

Making Healing Arts: Feminine Energy at the Core of Overcoming Recidivism (PCC CORE)

The workshop will focus on the intersection of personal healing, collective action, and advocacy for justice in the context of ending mass incarceration, particularly as it impacts women and system-impacted students. By showcasing the voices of women in different stages of their educational journey at Pasadena City College (PCC) and in the CORE (Community Overcoming Recidivism through Education) program, we aim to center the narrative of those most directly affected by the prison industrial complex. The workshop will use storytelling, writing, and group reflection to empower participants to explore ideas of reclamation, abolition, and prosperity, inspired by the theme of feminine energy and its role in justice advocacy.

The primary goal of the Pasadena City College CORE (Community Overcoming Recidivism through Education) program is to develop a holistic approach that empowers students to succeed in higher education and beyond, offering both academic support and healing resources. We partner with Inscape Magazine to publish a book of writing and art from the system-impacted and formerly or currently incarcerated community. This panel discussion facilitated by Advocates for Equity and Justice Angela Gonzales and Adolfo Garcia will feature Natalia Garcia, Janneth Huaste, Jewelz Salas, and Jayme Chutan.

MANIFESTO: Power to the People

Employing an activist pedagogy, the MANIFESTO: Power to the People workshop will present strategies of creative activism addressing incarceration and the prison industrial complex, imagining social reforms, discussing strategies for change, and fostering the possibility of collaboration. The workshop will begin with a Museological and Curatorial Activism Lecture introducing participants to a brief history of the museum as a racial apparatus of state and social discipline, rising tangentially with carceral mechanisms to conversely confer status or repress. Contemporary curatorial activism strategies will then be touched upon, demonstrating how to weaponize the use of the museum’s rhetoric of display to create new meanings. Following the lecture, participants will create manifestos sharing ideas about incarceration, the prison industrial complex, the exhibitionary complex, and imagining social reform while crafting artworks that visually reflect these intentions. Materials will be provided, but feel free to bring your own imagery and crafting materials. No art experience is required!

Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Jennifer Vanderpool and curator Rachel Schmid will lead the MANIFESTO: Power to the People workshop. Vanderpool has exhibited solo shows at museums and galleries in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Ukraine, Russia, and Vietnam. Her recent fellowships include awards from the British Academy Leverhulme Trust, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time, a partnership with the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Schmid is currently a doctoral student in Cultural and Museum studies at Claremont Graduate University, where her research considers the connections between collecting, possession, and display, as well as constructs of power dynamics. Previously, she worked for nine years at California Lutheran University as curator of the William Rolland Gallery of Fine Art and the Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Culture, where she helmed the permanent collection and taught courses on Arts Management and Museum Studies. Through their collaborative projects, Vanderpool and Schmid create storytelling platforms as modes of public discourse that underscore structural inequalities and calls for social reform.

Shedding Old Skin, Embracing the New: Writing as a radical approach to liberation (Empowerment Avenue)

In alignment with the Year of the Snake’s theme of renewal, and shedding ones old skin for new, we will explore how our work within an inside-outside writing collective has helped people process their past identities shaped by incarceration and embrace new narratives. Our workshop will share narratives of possibility, resilience, and freedom — with incarcerated people taking back their stories and telling them from a lived experience perspective — as well as break down the logistics of how we work across prison walls. The workshop will also include a call-in by incarcerated journalist Christopher Blackwell.

Leading the workshop is Emily Nonko and Kun Lyna Chan Tauch.

Emily Nonko is a journalist and organizer based in New York. She co-founded Empowerment Avenue, an inside-outside collective that supported publication of hundreds of articles and essays from incarcerated writers, and will co-launch The Narrative Change Lab with incarcerated journalist Christopher Blackwell in January 2026.

Kun “K” Tauch is a writer, advocate, and facilitator dedicated to amplifying the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. As a member of the Narrative Change Lab, K collaborates with journalist Emily Nonko to support incarcerated writers in developing and publishing their work. His own writing has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, where he explored the unexpected solace of crochet behind bars; Inquest, where he co-authored a piece with Sutina Green and her family on expanding the view of victimhood; and The Marshall Project, where he examined how California prisons classified Asians and Pacific Islanders as “OTHERS,” erasing their identities. Beyond writing, K is a California Justice Leader (through Impact Justice & AmeriCorps) and an intern with The Prism Way, where he helps individuals navigate reentry through programs focused on healing, accountability, and transformation. With a passion for storytelling and social justice, K works at the intersection of narrative change, advocacy, and community empowerment, using his lived experience to challenge perceptions and create spaces for voices that have long been silenced. K earned his Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Communication while incarcerated and is currently enrolling in the Master of Business Administration program at Cal State Los Angeles.