For over 20 years Lorrie Heagy has been leading arts education integration in Juneau. This month the Alaska Arts Education Consortium awarded Lorrie the Arts Leader Champion of the Arts in Education Award. The award is given to those who carry the torch for arts education through high-caliber instruction, arts support, and ongoing arts promotion.
Listeners inside and outside of Colorado’s prison system can now tune in to music, stories, news and entertainment through Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio. Inside Wire is created by and for Colorado’s incarcerated residents. Launched on March 1, it’s the latest project conceived by the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI).
“We’re the first statewide prison radio station in the country, and the first in the world to stream to the public,” says Ashley Hamilton, assistant professor of theatre and co-founder and executive director of DU PAI, a program that provides educational creative arts experiences to enrich the lives of incarcerated people.
The radio station got its start in late 2020 when the DU PAI team began imagining ways to connect with the prison population during the pandemic. Hamilton has worked within the U.S. correctional system for almost a decade, most recently with the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC). The team pitched the idea t