Michelle Daniel Jones

Dr. Michelle Daniel Jones, PhD completed a doctorate in the American studies program at New York University, May 2025.  Her dissertation focused on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated women inside the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project and Survival Art. 

Daniel Jones is a founding member and executive director of Constructing Our Future, a reentry and housing organization for women created by herself and other incarcerated colleagues inside the Indiana Women’s Prison. She is a 2017-18 Beyond the Bars fellow, a 2017-18 research fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and a 2018-19 Ford Foundation Bearing Witness Fellow with Art for Justice, a 2019 SOZE Foundation Right of Return Fellow, a 2019 Code for America Fellow, a 2021 Mural Arts Rendering Justice Fellow and an 2022Artist for the People Practitioner Fellow at the Human Rights Lab/Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago.  2024Women Transcending Collective Leadership Institute Fellow at the Columbia University-Center for Justice; 2025 FICGN Certified Non-Profit Professional Fellow. Dr. Daniel Jones is also a co-founder of the FIRE Collective, an interdisciplinary research collective currently studying post-traumatic prison disorder.

As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert she creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of taskforces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration.  Daniel Jones has worked with Second Chance Educational Alliance, Women Transcending Oral History Project and the Survivor’s Justice Project as a senior research consultant.  She serves on the boards of Worth Rises and the Correctional Association of New York and served on the advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, the Education Trust, A Touch of Light, the Urban Institute, American Prison Writing Archive and ITHAKA's Higher Education in Prison Research project.

Dr. Daniel Jones is co-editor with Elizabeth Nelson and her incarcerated and formerly incarcerated colleagues of a new award-winning history on Indiana’s carceral institutions titled, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848 – 1920.  As an artist, further, Daniel Jones is interested in finding ways to funnel her research pursuits into theater, dance, and photography.  She co-authored an original play with Anastazia Schmid, The Duchess of Stringtown that was produced in Indianapolis and New York City.  Daniel Jones’s artist installation about the weaponization of stigma, “Point of Triangulation: Intersections of Identity,” ran at the New York University, Gallatin Galleries, the Beyond the Bars Conference at Columbia University, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and a Mural Arts of Philadelphia permanent mural. Daniel Jones is curator and featured artist in “Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death and Imprisonment” exhibition about COVID-19 in prisons that opened July 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.  Daniel Jones co-produced Degrees of Freedom documentary about incarcerated women’s leadership in restoring higher education inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility that world premiered at the Dances With Film Festival in New York, December 2024.