Co-Executive Director Announcement; “Pieces of Hope” Open Mic Night; “The City That Carries Us: Pain, Streets, and Heartbeats”; The Parable Path; and Mountain View Theater Project News

Maine Inside Out would not be possible without the support, care, and partnership of our community. We are grateful for all the ways you’ve shown up to engage with our workshops and performances, partner on projects, and support our work. 

Join us for our last open mic night of 2023! This event will be a place to say farewell to Bruce & Margot, MIO’s Co-Executive Directors.

Our film features our work this past year with artists at Lewiston Middle School, King Middle School in Portland, and Mountain View Correctional Facility; the most recent Mountain View performance & our October Open Mic Night

Our work facilitated by MIO’s talented theater team is made possible by our supporters (like you!) who are building a world of courage, trust, and connection that attends to the systemic roots of harm. In this time of immense grief here in Lewiston and beyond, MIO’s approach shifts power and inspires new perspectives, creating openings for change and healing. Our model is built on supporting system-impacted leaders and artists with peer support, leadership development, and mutual aid. 

The end of 2023 marks our last day as Co-Executive Directors at MIO. It has been a beautiful journey in our shared role, learning and growing over the past 3 years together. Bruce will leave the role after 8 years at MIO - 3 years in the Co-Executive Director role and 5 years on the MIO board - and Margot will leave the role with 15 years at MIO as co-founder and in various staff roles over the years and most recently 3 years as the Co-Executive Director, alongside Bruce. We thrived as a leadership team and are now leaving the role to the next team of leaders. 

We are here and have been on the ground with our MIO community and Lewiston friends, family, and partners today, supporting each other as we continue to receive news and updates as the tragedies continue to unfold

MIO’s October 2023 Open Mic Night, New performance & Film Debut in November, RCOM partnership spotlight, and the Prison Pod episode featuring Joseph Jackson & Bruce King

Maine Inside Out was on tour this August offering Theater of the Oppressed workshops across the state. 

Check out the upcoming September 2023 Events!

What or who is in need of your courage right now? What does it look like for us all to step into “heart-time” and meet the challenges of this moment with “courage beyond control” ? 

In May, MIO’s two groups at Lewiston Middle School and two groups at King Middle School premiered four new original plays for over 1,000 audience members of youth, school staff, families, and community members. The plays were created by the groups over 12 weeks and portrayed themes of friendship, peer pressure, false accusations, trust, bullying, domestic violence, drug addiction, gun violence, loss, and more.

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.