Maine Inside Out has kicked off spring with workshops, community events, performance preparation, planning our Juneteenth celebration, and welcoming new staff.

Our team continues to work with amazing students and artists, and as always, learn from the people who connect with and support MIO’s theater and art for social change. We’re excited to share performance and community event dates, and look forward to seeing you there!

Maine Inside Out completed our second cycle of workshops and performances at Lewiston Middle School last week. It was a special week of performances, community dialogue, celebration and change led by incredible young artist. Thank you everyone who has supported our work and who joined us for the performances of "Don't Silence Us" and "Invisible: See Me For Who I Am" ! Check out a few photos from the middle school performances.

Friends, 

“If Not Us, Then Who?” is the title and the core question at the heart of Maine Inside Out’s latest original play. The play was created by artists incarcerated at Mountain View Correctional Facility in our first theater workshop inside a correctional facility since the COVID-19 pandemic. MIO members inside the facility advocated for the opportunity to do this work together because they wanted to start a conversation with each other, with the facility, and with you.

This fall, generations of Maine Inside Out artists will share new original work. These performances will happen in schools, within prison walls, and in community spaces.  Maine Inside Out has a long history of moving between these spaces and connecting people across boundaries with art.

This month Maine Inside Out lost another beloved member of our community. On July 14, Alex Lewis died inside Maine Correctional Center. Alex joined MIO inside Long Creek in 2019 as a member of the group that created the play “The Masks We Wear.” Recently, Alex was involved in MIO from inside. He was working on a book of poems and helped start the project “Writing on the Walls” that features artwork by members inside prisons and jails. Alex was a father, fiancé, brother, and friend who was deeply loved and is now painfully missed. 

This year, Maine celebrates the second anniversary of recognizing Juneteenth as a State holiday. On June 17, Maine Inside Out and friends will host a celebration of Juneteenth in Lewiston’s Kennedy Park and call for liberation from systems of racial violence and oppression. Join us on June 17 – and at events hosted by our partners across the state – in reckoning with the legacies of slavery and the struggle for liberation that are so alive today.

We are so excited to welcome you into our new home in Lewiston, and in the meantime we'd love to connect with you. MIO is a laboratory for social transformation and you are part of it. Paolo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an inspiration for MIO, writes “at the point of encounter… there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they know now.”

On Wednesday, November 17, 2021, we walked through the doors of the new site at 168 Lisbon St in Lewiston. It is the pilot for MIO’s collective vision: a network of welcoming, loving, creative community spaces across our state led by and for people impacted by incarceration. In our first opening ceremony - and there will be many more - we called in the names of everyone past, present and future whose heart and hands have led us to this point.

On Saturday, September 18 Maine Inside Out participated in the Rally for Recovery in Lewiston’s Kennedy Park. MIO artists performed a short original play - Imagine Open Doors - and individual poetry and music on the themes of addiction, trauma, recovery, community, and social change.

How do we know that we belong?

How do the communities we live in impact our sense of belonging?

What would it be like to live in a community where each person belongs?

On Wednesday, Governor Janet Mills vetoed LD 1668.

Maine Inside Out celebrates Juneteenth in Congress Square Park with partners and community.

On Tuesday, May 25 Maine Inside Out joined a coalition of community artists and organizations organized by Indigo Arts Alliance to hold A Day of Remembrance one year since the murder of George Floyd. In the words of our partners at Indigo Arts Alliance,

Today is the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. Maine Inside Out joins Indigo Arts Alliance and a coalition of community artists and organizations this evening for A Day of Remembrance to celebrate and mourn the lives that have been lost to state violence and systemic racism. Names we remember every day as we fight for, imagine and build collective liberation. Black Lives Matter.

Last Wednesday, MIO artists shared their artistic visions of true justice. Following the performances, Skye Gosselin of Maine Youth Justice shared opportunities for ACTION towards justice in Maine. We are visioning and building true justice together through art, dialogue, community and action. Thank you for joining us.

On Wednesday, April 28 Maine Inside Out presents our next virtual open mic "A Vision of True Justice." A world without prisons is possible when we see visions of true justice.

Come join us for our April events!

Watch MIO's new film about the history of our Lewiston group and our vision to open a community site in 2021:

We are thrilled to announce that this year MIO is opening doors to a community site in Lewiston!

How do we build a world without prisons? A world of relationship and connection, instead of silos and cells?