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Vitalis Im is an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Human Services at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. For the past six years, Dr. Im has been facilitating improvisational theatre, music, and creative writing workshops in Michigan prisons with the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since 2021, Dr. Im has been a curator with the Annual Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons, one of the largest and longest-running exhibitions in the world that features works of art created by incarcerated artists. 

An extension of this work, his ethnographic research concerns the politics of artmaking practices in prisons. His primary intervention is to illuminate the ways in which art functions as a technology that both countermands and sustains what he calls the relational violences of confinement. Dr. Im’s teaching is informed by his work in prisons, as well, which incorporates participatory, arts-based pedagogic strategies and facilitates deep engagement with the problematic of mass incarceration in America.

Dr. Im’s scholarship and pedagogy are further shaped by his work as a psychotherapist and social worker. Dr. Im is the founder and co-director of Compass, a program at FairSky Foundation that provides formerly incarcerated people in the state of Michigan with low-to-no-cost psychotherapeutic services including counseling and psychological assessments.