Annenkovna is a citizen of planet Earth, with roots indigenous to it. She was born by the sea, amid political turmoil and revolution. Annenkovna’s mission, as a human and an artist, is to develop deeper understanding, compassion, and joie de vivre.

Annenkovna utilizes whatever mediums she can access—from stone sculpture to linen coffee paintings. While attending Brooklyn International Academy in NY, she made an impact with her art in many different arenas—from airbrushing graphics on her friends' lowriders to exhibiting in art shows to making backdrops for theater. After graduating, Annenkovna studied abroad, earning a degree in biology and later, culinary ethics and nutritional supplementation. These studies also became forms of artistic expression in her repertoire.

Annenkovna’s artwork and poetry have been featured in exhibitions and publications nationwide and internationally including: Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration curated by Nicole Fleetwood, shown at multiple venues from MoMA PS1, New York, to Toronto, Canada (2019-2024); Ending The Exception [To the 13th Amendment], Philly Mural Arts Project, Peoples Plaza Philadelphia (2023); The President Portrait Project, Lincoln's Cottage Museum, Washington, DC (2024); 1st place for Poetry and Art in Picture a Free World Art Show, Concept Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA (2023-2024); and Painting Ourselves Into Society, Berkeley Art Center (2023-2024).

Annenkovna’s case was recently overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court on the grounds of wrongful conviction. After six years in prison, she is now free to pursue her dreams and aspirations.

Sonny Lee is a self-taught artist who works across many mediums—graphite pencil, ink, paint, and sculpture—depending on the message he wishes to convey. He’s drawn to realism and fantasy, and uses his art to inspire and uplift others; to offer motivation and meaning. 

Painting gives Lee a sense of purpose. It helps him stay focused on his personal goals. Outside of his artwork, Lee is currently working toward a degree in psychology. His dream is to one day reunite with his family and make a positive impact in the community. He hopes viewers can observe this spirit in his artwork.

Sean J. Marshall is an artist from Colorado Springs, Colorado. He’s always had a love for art, but never considered pursuing an art career until he was incarcerated at a young age. While incarcerated, Sean used art as a means to heal and escape his reality, and as a tool to bring awareness to various social issues, and inspire hope within others. 

Marshall is mostly self-taught, but attributes the foundations of his skills to his mentor, artist John P. Sherman. Marshall and Sherman were incarcerated together, and are both known for their realism and portrait work, and for being adept with a variety of mediums.

Now a free man and having put his troubled past behind him, Marshall hopes his art in all of its forms will spur conversation and encapsulate the human experience. Art saved his life, and he hopes it will be a tool he can use to save others.

SARA BENNETT, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, is a former public defenderwho primarily photographs women with life sentences, both inside and outside prison, as a way to draw attention to the problems of mass incarceration.

Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries, including group shows such as Blanton Museum of Art’s Day Jobs, MoMA PS1’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and the Museum of the City of New York’sNew York Now: Home, and solo shows at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, Photovillein Brooklyn, New York, and Rotterdam Photo 2023. Her work is in the collection of, among others, the John Hays Library at Brown University, the Cantor Museum of Arts at Stanford University, and the Museum of the City of New York, and has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker Photo Booth, and Variety & Rolling Stone’s American (In)Justice.Bennett is the 2023 Emerging Laureate of the International Women in Photo Association. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mobilize, or subvert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been nationally recognized for her multi-year projects that aim to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and transform places of precarity into spaces of possibility. Formative works, such as “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and the “96 Acres Project,” include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood. Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. The Art for Justice Fund has supported Gaspar’s projects, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Rios was born and raised on the west and north sides of Denver, where he’s been drawing since he could pick up a crayon. He’s self-taught, with a curious and creative mind. Rios tries to capture the world around him—from cartoons to cars, to the realities of incarceration and mental illness. 

Through Impact Arts and other organizations, Rios has been honored to participate in exhibitions that explore prison spaces and the people within, including shows at SUNY Fredonia, the Museum of Art Fort Collins, the Colorado State Capitol, and a mural project in Denver’s RiNo Art District. 

Rio’s Chicano culture, lived experience, and mental health journey inspires much of his work. Art helps him survive; it lifts him out of difficult conditions and allows him to express who he is, and who he’s becoming.

Rios hopes people see his art and understand that, even with a painful past, he’s still human, still growing, and still striving to leave a legacy of change.

Molly Ott is a South Carolinian whose work is preoccupied with rituals of Americana and personal myth. She works with nonprofits in Los Angeles county to bring visual art and creative writing programming to juveniles and adults within the carceral system. She holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder in Sculpture and Post Studio Practice.

Kirven grew up on the south side of Colorado Springs, where he made art and played sports to stay out of trouble. Kirven taught himself to draw comic book characters and animals. He was invited to Bemis Art School for Children twice, and excelled in art classes from K-12. He went to college for art and music production. He stopped creating for nearly two decades, until he rediscovered his love for art in prison.

Kirven is inspired to create art about the social, political, and economic injustices inflicted by America's government on Aboriginal, Indigenous, and poor people. He wants to raise awareness about the racial supremacy ideology that’s alive in this country and around the world. Expressing how he feels through his art helps Kirven work through his feelings and relieve stress. He hopes to touch others with his artwork, and to inspire change in both people’s perspectives, and the world.

Artist Lynell J. Hill chose the pseudonym HEaL to represent what he desires his art to accomplish: to facilitate HEaLing in others as it does for him.

Born to the streets of Detroit, HEaL was uprooted and moved to North Carolina, where he bounced between foster care and group homes. He joined the military and traveled the states, always searching for an identity and sense of belonging. 

His first encounter with art as a tool for HEaLing was while he was a teen in foster care, held captive in a room which felt like a prison cell. Confined and isolated, his pen and paper became his escape; his imagination, his freedom.

HEaL hopes his art acts as proof that art can liberate us from even the darkest places, no matter the location or circumstance.

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Justin Moore was born and raised on a modest family farm nestled in the shadows of the rugged Rocky Mountains of Northern Colorado.

Moore writes creative nonfiction with a tint of dirty realism. His writing explores people’s patterns through life's variables and vastitudes, starting with his own internal spirals. 

His creative inspirations are all misunderstood mavericks; visionaries unafraid of the solo road for the sake of a job rightly done. Similarly, Moore strives to toe the fault line between chaos and creative potential with his own writing practice.

Writing is his escape from the stress of incarceration, though his experiences in the institution fuel his "ballpoint blowtorch." Through words, he wishes to do what visual art does for the eye—to conjure sensations that are visceral, vibrant, and resonant.

Dominguez was born and raised in Denver. He dabbled with drawing growing up and was guided by his uncle, who was an amazing artist. But once the streets got ahold of him, he drifted away from his love for art. 

In 2008, Dominguez picked up his pencil and started to draw again, and began using his art to strengthen the relationship with his youngest daughter. Then in 2018, 10 years into his lengthy prison sentence, he was saved. From that point on, his dream was to tell the world about Jesus, and what He did for Dominguez’s life. 

But there was an obstacle between him and the world he was trying to reach—prison walls.

Dominguez felt moved by the Lord to draw what he was reading in the Bible. The responses he received from family and friends helped him realize drawing was his gift, which motivated him to keep creating. It was at the first exhibition with Unchained Voices that his dream came alive—for his art and its message to be seen by the world. His prayer is that you never allow any obstacle to stop you from reaching your dream.

Castillo is a self-taught artist from Huntington Beach, California. As a child, he first learned to make art by sketching freeze frames of his favorite cartoons. As a teenager, he experimented with Chicano art, calligraphy, and graffiti.

Castillo began working seriously in acrylic and oil in his mid-twenties while incarcerated in the Colorado Department of Corrections. His paintings have been featured in numerous exhibitions, including shows at the McNichols Building in Denver; the Marion Gallery at SUNY Fredonia; the Museum of Art Fort Collins; the Colorado State Capitol; and the Boulder Public Library. 

Through his artwork, Hector hopes to inspire viewers—especially those unfamiliar with the prison system—to become more confident, goal-driven, and imaginative. He also strives to advocate for meaningful prison and justice system reform. He wants people to see that an artist in prison can still contribute beauty, truth, and transformation to the world.

Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1947, Emanuel Martinez began his artistic career at the age of thirteen, when he painted his first mural. He was later commissioned to create various works at the Juvenile Detention Center in Golden, where he painted his first mural. At 16, he joined Los Voluntarios, a social justice organization, and continued working with Civil Rights organizations in Colorado, New Mexico, and California, such as the United Farm Workers Organization in Delano, CA. Since 1965, Emanuel has been committed to the Chicano/Latino struggle for social justice in the United States, earning several accolades.

At 76, he continues his work with incarcerated youth through the Emanuel Project, which has enabled him to create 50 murals in facilities across 14 states. Emanuel is recognized as the pioneer of the community mural movement in Colorado and has painted national and international murals during the last five decades. His contributions have been highlighted in numerous publications, including a retrospective book on his career.

Originally from Salt Lake City, Ware began his artistic journey in the 90’s with graffiti—a rare and expressive outlet that became his lifeline. After studying at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, he continued to evolve his creative practice, using art not just as expression, but as a form of survival that helps him grow, heal, and level up with every piece.

Ware’s work is deeply personal, and each piece tells a story—his own story, but also one that can mirror the viewer’s experience, so his art resonates universally.

Ware has been honored to have work featured in several regional shows, including Creating Community in Confinement, a co-production of Impact Arts and Prison Art Experience at the Colorado State Capitol in Spring 2024, and the University of Denver Law School’s Spring Show for Incarcerated Artists in 2025. He’s a proud board member of Impact Arts, and is currently launching a collective to support formerly incarcerated artists in continuing their creative journeys. For Ware, art isn’t just what he does—it’s who he is.

McGill was born in Colorado Springs and raised in Hutchinson, Kansas, with two sisters He and his siblings were exposed to art from a young age through PBS, and they did their best to mimic what they saw on the screen. In high school, McGill discovered he had a talent for graphite drawing. He went on to receive his BFA, where he focused primarily on expressing his emotions through wood and steel.

In prison, McGill’s creative outlet returned to drawing, where he discovered that the emotions of the animals he drew related to how he felt and what he saw in the people around him. Drawing continues to inspire McGill to see the person in the midst of chaos—because while there’s chaos in prison, there’s also a brotherhood that inspires him to move forward, be better, and live a worthy life.

Lehman is a self-taught artist who learned to draw while serving time in solitary confinement in the Colorado Department of Corrections. After his release in 2014, he attended the Art Institute of Colorado for a year for graphic design. 

Now back in prison, Lehman works primarily in pencil, colored pencil, and ballpoint pen, due to the relative availability of these materials in confinement. His art is dark, gritty, provocative, and packed with detailed imagery and hidden messages. He often pairs his renderings with poems to take viewers and readers on an emotional journey into his creative soul. 

Lehman hopes that through his art, he can remain connected to his own humanity, and challenge others’ ideas of what art can be, say, and achieve.

Unchained Voices is a 501c3 organization and an annual public art show featuring the work of artists who are incarcerated in Colorado. Each exhibition is an opportunity to celebrate the incredible creative work being produced inside state correctional facilities, while fostering public awareness of our interconnection with Colorado’s incarcerated community and our shared humanity. Participating artists value the opportunity to share their stories with the public, sell their work online, and earn income.