Description of event attended by 120 people on 5th December 2013 at London Metropolitan University:

Curated by London Met Digital Media lecturer and filmmaker Suzanne Cohen, the event features presentations and Q&As with two creative practitioners working in the criminal justice system.

Tony Gammidge runs video and animation projects on medium secure and psychiatric units. These collaborative projects aim to give voice to the service users on the units, many of whom are amongst the most socially excluded and stigmatised in our society. They give participants an opportunity to make their own films using stories from their experiences, memories and imagination. He will be screening a number of short films from the projects during the presentation.

Spoken word poet Leah Thorn will give a picture of the restorative and rehabilitative power of trauma-informed arts practice in prison, drawing on extracts from documentary and art films collected during her Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship in the United States. There will be a specific focus on the universality of women’s narratives, as women are vulnerable and marginalized within a Criminal Justice System designed for men.