About the festival
The Resilience Arts Festival highlights the human experience from the perspective of people impacted by the criminal legal system, told by award-winning writers who have lived it. From torture survivors who have been on Death Row to those who spent decades wrongfully incarcerated, the Resilience Arts Festival utilizes art to transform experiences of isolation into sources of community connection.
how it started
The founders of the Mud Theatre Project first encountered the Chicago Torture Justice Center through a newsletter—CTJC’s monthly newsletter to individuals inside of the Illinois Department of Corrections. From 2022-2024, artists and writers inside Dixon Correctional Center corresponded through letter and email with the team at CTJC. When these artists—Brian Beals, Toussaint Daniels, and Darrion Benson—came home, they sought to continue what they started behind prison walls by bringing the power of storytelling to the communities they came from and were isolated from for decades.
In 2024, the Mud Theatre Project started as an incubation project at the Chicago Torture Justice Center. Through this partnership, the idea for an arts and theatre festival was born.