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. MIO connects us through play, dialogue, and the transformative power of art. These experiences help connect us across boundaries and dissolve the separation between audience and actor, supporting us to move and change together.
2026 Creative Ensemble
The 2026 Creative Ensemble will premiere a new original play + a new short documentary film in June - celebrating Juneteenth with live theater, film, and audience dialogue about mass incarceration in the US.
Premiere dates:
Thursday, June 11, 7 pm, The Public Theatre, Lewiston
Wednesday, June 17, 7 pm, Mayo Street Arts, Portland
Maine Inside Out’s newly formed 2026 Creative Ensemble takes the stage for the first time, premiering an original play drawn from lived experience, and a short documentary film about the 2025 ensemble’s “Broken Clock” tour. Honoring Juneteenth, these events center Black history, lived experience, and collective liberation, inviting audiences into active dialogue about US mass incarceration. These premieres are the launch of a statewide tour that will bring this work inside prisons, onto college campuses, and into communities across Maine.
These premieres are a rare chance to witness first-time performances from artists sharing their own stories, and to sit in a room where the walls between audience and performer dissolve. At a moment when the US holds more people in prison than any other country, this is a space to feel, think, and reckon together. Honoring Juneteenth means honoring the ongoing work of liberation, and MIO believes that work happens in community, through art, in rooms exactly like this one.
Tickets available:
This tour will be entirely supported by donations, sponsorship contributions, and grants.
Contact us for sponsorship opportunities or to book a performance as part of our 2026 tour.
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.