The MIO Creative Ensemble
Maine Inside Out’s Creative Ensemble is a group of staff and community artists using theater to explore themes connected to our identities, life experiences, and the societal context in which we exist together. We are an intentionally mixed group - intergenerational, multi-identity, and across lived experiences of incarceration - because the barriers we’re working to dissolve must first be named and felt. In a world where retribution and violence continue to be the response violence, MIO offers an alternative. Through play, dialogue, and the transformative power of art, we practice deep listening, step into the tensions of polarized moments, and work to become coherent as a collective and as a community. These experiences help connect audiences and actors across boundaries, supporting us to move and change together.
2026 Creative Ensemble
Maine Inside Out’s newly formed 2026 Creative Ensemble of staff and community artists have begun developing original work drawn from lived experience of the criminal justice system.
Our Juneteenth community dialogue events in Lewiston and Portland will feature a first showing of that work, alongside the premiere of a short documentary film about the 2025 ensemble’s “Broken Clock” tour inside prisons, on college campuses, and in communities across Maine.
The performance is a starting point, not the destination. This is a chance to be a room where the walls between audience and performer dissolve. What we’re really here for is each other - to think, feel, and reckon together about US mass incarceration and what liberation actually looks like in our communities.
2025 Creative Ensemble
The MIO Creative Ensemble launched in 2024, developing and touring the original play, “Broken Clock,” inside prisons and in communities across Maine. The tour began in Lewiston in June 2024 and held its finale in Portland in December 2025, engaging more than 1,800 audience members in active dialogue and inspiring social action.
The tour facilitated a collective, heart-centered reckoning with the impacts of mass incarceration. These conversations are opening new possibilities. They’re helping us all see each other more fully and imagine how we can transform harmful systems.