Remaking Democracy: Danielle Chynoweth and Elizabeth Adams

Danielle Chynoweth is a local-to-national leader in the Media Justice and Housing Rights movements. As an elected public servant, she has designed alternative crisis response, family shelter, and Solidarity Gardens, and spearheaded public arts, community broadband, solar affordable housing, and police oversight. She was the Organizing Director for Media Justice and cofounded the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. She teaches social change at the University of Illinois, the School for Designing a Society, and internationally.

Elizabeth Adams, PhD, is a composer, teacher, and caregiver, who has worked at the intersection of art, education, and organizing for over twenty years. As a knowledge worker intent on creating the cultural change that will support social justice, she co-instigated Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, and organized with the Crown Heights Tenant Union, Free University NYC, and What A Neighborhood! She has taught at Columbia University and the School for Designing a Society.

Sarah Ross is an artist centered on the spatial politics of race, gender, class and control. In 2011 she co-founded the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP), a project that brings together artists, writers and scholars in and outside Stateville prison to create public projects. Sarah worked on Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, a campaign for reparations for survivors of Chicago police torture. She is a co-author of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom (2019); Carving Out Rights From Inside the Prison Industrial Complex 2021) and Our Tuesday Girl: An Unfurling for Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs. Sarah is a Soros Justice Media Fellow. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Meadow Jones, PhD, is a literary artist, filmmaker, and social practice artist whose work brings together writing, visual media, and collaborative forms of making. Her practice is grounded in arts-based research and community-based facilitation, with an emphasis on narrative, material processes, and collective authorship. She recently completed her postdoctoral work with UCLA DataX and the Department of Gender Studies, where she worked on her book Archiving the Trauma Diaspora, focused on arts-based practices and public storytelling. See: www.meadowjones.com and datax.ucla.edu/people/meadow-jones-0