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 Lauren Hamilton is CEO of The Circle: A Center for Artistic Justice and an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Denver.
Ashley's work ranges from visioning and leading The Circle, creating theatre, storytelling and performance with community partners and directing and devising university and professional work across the country. Ashley's expertise focuses on the complexities of teaching and creating art in applied spaces — specifically through the use of interview and storytelling — and how this practice can be used as an opportunity for transformation, community building and culture shifts in individuals and systems. Further, Ashley has special expertise in sharing the results of her work with the community and the public to generate conversation and social change.
Ashley has directed, devised and created community and storytelling experiences in a breadth of traditional and diverse spaces: Off-Broadway, at the University of Denver, New York University, with folks experiencing homelessness, with young adults in India and East Africa, mental health care facilities, in dozens of public and private schools and with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) Off-Center. Additionally, Ashley has been working within the United States’ correctional system for fourteen years as an educator and artist and has taught and created various educational and artistic projects in over thirty prisons in the United States, creating with thousands of currently incarcerated and previously incarcerated people, and their loved ones. Ashley has taught for four different prison education programs, developing and leading various courses in associate and bachelor degree programs inside prisons. Ashley also co-founded and ran a theatre company for men and women coming home from prison in New York City called ReEmergent Theatre. Ashley is also 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 (incarcerated in the Colorado Department of Corrections).
In addition to Ashley’s educational, administrative, management and visioning 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, producing the With(in) podcast, executing two prison theatre tours (including one to the public), overseeing the first 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 — it currently stands as the most shared press release in the history of The University of Denver.
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 Masters 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. Ashley is in the process of becoming a registered drama therapist (RDT).
As a tenured professor, Ashley teaches courses at the University of Denver such as Theatre Imagination, Page to Stage, How to Read a Play, Theatre for Social Change, Interview-Based Theatre and more.
Ashley believes that creating intentional spaces for storytelling and theatrical creation has endless possibilities for transformation and healing.
