REEL LIFE
The Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University 
has played a crucial role in demonstrating over and over again how the arts are a spring board for discourse on contemporary issues and how art IS a catalyst for social change. PFW has granted the Wexner Center continuously for many years as their ability to host and create programs that draws in the expertise of artists, academics and opinion leaders in a variety of fields to address the most significant social of our times personifies our Mission. They have an outstanding annual program created in 2006m “Director’s Dialogue on Art and Social Change”. Past Dialogue have elicited insightful conversations about gender bias, racial inequality, healthcare in America, climate change, women, veterans, police brutality and civic unrest. This year the Dialogue will focus on Pens to Pictures, a program to teach empowerment to incarcerated women that allows them to tell their stories via film. Filmmaker and Wright State Ass’t Prof. Chinonye Chukwu in conjunction with the Dayton Correctional Institution (DCI) guided 5 incarcerated women through an 8 week screenwriting course that ultimately created 5 screenplays that will be “brought to life” with the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio Program providing all the post production. The Warden of (DCI) said “This project has empowered the women by giving them a voice to tell their stories to the outside world.”
