Mira is an abolitionist artist, educator, researcher, and organizer based in Chicago. Their work explores spacial justice and global histories of resistance with a focus on the role state violence, censorship, and manufactured scarcity have had on our collective ability to imagine and enact other ways of life.
They are currently the Director of Operations at Walls Turned Sideways, Assistant Studio Manager at The Digs Chicago, and a teaching artist with REAL Youth Initiative.
Mira received a Master of Art’s in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Michigan where they studied Ethnic Studies, Art History, and Ceramics.
They have worked with the following organizations: Walls Turned Sideways, Real Youth Initiative, The Digs, Patric McCoy Legacy Project/Diasporal Rhythms, Groundcover News, Michigan Student Power Alliance, and NON:Opera Arts & Humanities
You can find more of their work on Instagram @coldandwetfromtheearth.
Build Community Not Prisons
Summer 2025
Two-color screenprint; handdrawn and -printed. Screens burned at Hoofprint Chicago.
- This print was made as a part of Walls Turned Sideways’ NO NEW PRISONS Liberation Lab cohort led by Jimmy Soto from Build Communities, Not Prisons and Sarah Ross in collaboration with the No New Prisons IL campaign. In the summer of 2025, fifteen artists came together over six workshops to discuss ideas of community safety, learn more about the state’s plans to build two new prisons, and to produce designs that focused on the themes of the No New Prisons campaign. The majority of participating artists were formerly incarcerated, collectively spending hundreds of years locked up. Between their personal experiences of life behind bars and research provided by No New Prisons campaign members, the artists generated compelling designs intended to ask questions and emphatically say, we need money and resources in our communities, not prisons.