Michelle Daniel Jones

Michelle Daniel Jones is a sixth-year doctoral student in the American studies program at New York University.  Her dissertation focuses on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated women and the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project.  As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert she creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of taskforces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration.  She has joined Second Chance Educational Alliance as a senior research consultant, Women Transcending Oral History Project at the Columbia University, Center for Justice, the Survivor’s Justice Project and serves on the boards of Worth Rises and the Correctional Association of New York and advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, the Education Trust, A Touch of Light, the Urban Institute and ITHAKA's Higher Education in Prison Research project. 

She is a founding member and board president of Constructing Our Future, a reentry and housing organization for women created by incarcerated women in Indiana and a Beyond the Bars fellow, a research fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and a Ford Foundation Bearing Witness Fellow with Art for Justice, a SOZE Foundation Right of Return Fellow, a Code for America Fellow, a Mural Arts Rendering Justice Fellow and an Artist for the People Practitioner Fellow at the Human Rights Lab/Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. 

Daniel Jones is co-editor with Elizabeth Nelson of a new history of Indiana’s carceral institutions for women with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated colleagues titled, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848 – 1920.  As an artist, further, Daniel Jones is interested in finding ways to funnel her research pursuits into theater, dance, and photography.  She co-authored an original play with Anastazia Schmid, The Duchess of Stringtown that was produced in Indianapolis and New York City.  Daniel Jones’s artist installation about the weaponization of stigma, “Point of Triangulation: Intersections of Identity,” ran at the New York University, Gallatin Galleries, the Beyond the Bars Conference at Columbia University, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and a Mural Arts of Philadelphia permanent mural. Daniel Jones is curator and featured artist in “Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death and Imprisonment” exhibition about COVID-19 in prisons opens July 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.