Human Rights Lab and CSRPC Announce 2022-2023 Practitioner Fellows
The Human Rights Lab and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at UChicago are pleased to announce our inaugural 2022 Practitioner Fellows: Dorothy Burge and Michelle Daniel Jones!
As part of their fellowships, each practitioner will complete a fellowship project of their own design that explores an aspect of the carceral system, curate their own series of public events, and participate in various community and university engagements throughout the year.
Practitioner Fellows are supported in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Centering Race Consortium, a partnership between race studies centers at Brown University, Stanford University, UChicago, and Yale University to center the study of race in the arts and humanities.
Read more about our 2022 Practitioner Fellows below.
Artist for the People Practitioner Fellow Dorothy Burge is a fabric and multimedia artist and community activist who is inspired by history and current issues of social justice. She is a self-taught quilter who began creating fiber art in the 1990s after the birth of her daughter, Maya. Dorothy is a native and current resident of Chicago, but is descendent from a long line of quilters who hailed from Mississippi. Her realization that the history and culture of her people were being passed through generations in this art form inspired her to use this medium as a tool to teach history, raise cultural awareness, and inspire action. Dorothy received her Masters of Arts in Urban Planning and Policy and her Bachelors of Arts in Art Design, both from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of Blacks Against Police Torture and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials; both are cultural collectives seeking justice for police torture survivors. Dorothy is also a member of the Women of Color Quilter’s Network, (WCQN), and her quilts were part of several WCQN exhibitions. Dorothy received a 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist fellowship and is an Envisioning Justice Commissioned Artist
Artist for the People Practitioner Fellow Michelle Daniel Jones, ABD is a fourth-year doctoral student in American Studies at New York University. Michelle’s dissertation focuses on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated people. Michelle’s fellowships include Beyond the Bars, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, Ford Foundation Bearing Witness with Art for Justice, SOZE Right of Return, Code for America and Mural Arts Rendering Justice. Together with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated colleagues, Michelle is publishing a history of Indiana’s carceral institutions for women forthcoming from The New Press. As an artist, Michelle finds ways to funnel her research into theater, dance, and photography. Michelle co-authored the play “The Duchess of Stringtown,” which was produced in 2017 in Indianapolis and New York, and her artist installation about weaponized stigma, “Point of Triangulation,” ran in New York in 2019 and 2020 and in Philadelphia with a public mural in October 2021.