About Ashley Lauren Hamilton, PhD

“How much light one can make of one’s shadow – that, to me, is the measure of the true artist.” – Maria Popova

Dr. Ashley Hamilton is the Executive Director of the Can Art Change the World? Foundation, founded by French Artist, JR.

For the last fifteen years, Ashley's expertise has focused on the complexities of creating art in applied and community spaces — specifically through the use of interview and narrative storytelling. Ashley’s work investigates how this practice can be used as an opportunity for transformation, community building and culture shifts in individuals and systems. Further, she has special expertise in sharing the results of her work with the community and the public to generate conversation and social change.

Ashley has taught at New York University, the University of Denver, City University of New York and for four Prison Education Programs. Ashley is a co-founder of the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI) and was the Executive Director of the program for seven years, securing an unprecedented multi-million dollar contract with the state of Colorado for four years. Ashley is a co-founder of The Beacon at Skyline: A Correctional Community model and co-founder of the praxis of Artistic Justice with George Chavez, Andrew Draper, Matthew LaBonte, Angel Lopez, Terry Mosley Jr. and Brett Phillips (who are currently incarcerated). Additionally, Ashley is a co-founder of The Circle: A Center for Artistic Justice, which creates educational and training opportunities for previously incarcerated people and employers of previously incarcerated people, using Artistic Justice. Ashley also co-founded, with Dr. Clare Hammoor, a theatre company for people coming home from prison in New York City called ReEmergent Theatre, which produced work Off-Broadway. 

Ashley has directed, devised and created community and storytelling experiences in a breadth of traditional and diverse spaces: Off-Broadway, in universities, with folks experiencing homelessness, with young adults in India and East Africa, in mental health care facilities, in dozens of public and private schools, and with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA). Ashley has taught and created various educational and artistic projects in over thirty prisons in the United States, creating alongside thousands of currently incarcerated and previously incarcerated people, and their loved ones.

In addition to Ashley’s educational and administrative work, Ashley has a robust practice of creating and overseeing several unprecedented, innovative artistic projects — including directing, producing and devising theatre and film productions such as IF LIGHT CLOSED ITS EYES, co-producing the With(in) podcast across four prisons, executing two prison theatre tours (including one to the public), overseeing a state-wide prison newspaper The Inside Report and the first state-wide, public-facing prison radio station in the world Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio. 

Since 2018 Ashley’s work has been mentioned and reviewed in over 200 national, international and local media stories from The New York Times to National FOX News, NBC News, CBS News, US News, National Public Radio (NPR), The Denver Post, Colorado Public Radio (CPR), Associated Press, Yahoo News and beyond. The press release for Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio alone was shared on 330 different sites and reached a potential audience of 222 million people.

Ashley has a PhD in Educational Theatre, Theatre for Colleges and Communities from New York University where she focused on devising theatre in prison as rehabilitation. Her dissertation is titled: Towards Rehabilitation: Devised Theatre as Liminal Transformer in a Women’s Maximum Security Prison. Ashley also has a Master’s Degree from New York University in Educational Theatre, Theatre for Colleges and Communities where she focused on Interview-Based/Verbatim Theatre and a BFA in Performance from the University of Colorado at Boulder.