In Spring 2025, Dr. Irvin Manuel Gonzalez led the Department of Dance’s inaugural course through the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP). The semester focused on introducing students to the concept of dance as a tool for community engagement and practices for developing mutually beneficial arts partnerships in and beyond prisons. Additionally, students had the opportunity to collaborate on creating choreographies that showcased dance’s potential as a tool for storytelling. The class, which included both campus students and incarcerated students from London Correctional Institute, became a space to learn firsthand about how prisons operate.

Zoey November, an MFA student in Dance, shared, “This course with OPEEP has been incredibly transformative for me because it has actually inspired me to go into a career with education for incarcerated people. But I think that every student should take a class with OPEEP because it’ll challenge you to grow in ways that you haven’t grown before. You’ll build a type of community that’s literally like no other. And who knows, it might just change your future.”

Carlos, a student at London Correctional Institute, reflected, “Over the course of fifteen weeks, my regard for dancing shifted from a venal veneer to a medium capable of engaging in the spaces of socio-political governance. Dancing, and the study of dancing, can elucidate social issues through the immediacy of the body...” Click here to read more.

Dr. Gonzalez’s research—focused on how Mexican and Mexican American, working-class bodies create transnational communities through Latine social dance practices—was the inspiration for this course. Combined with his previous work with the Dancing Through Prison Walls organization in Los Angeles and extensive time developing various community engagement projects, the course immersed students in understanding how we construct connections across various groups and communities through art.

The course will return in Spring 2026, with applications to enroll opening this Autumn semester.