Sarah McKenzie is a visual artist based in Boulder. She has exhibited her paintings nationally, including shows with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Yale School of Architecture, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Since 2020 she has been working on an extended project researching and painting the architecture of prisons. In 2021, she was awarded the Marion International Fellowship for the Visual and Performing Arts to support her research into carceral space. That same year, she also began teaching art classes inside the Colorado Department of Corrections through the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative. In 2024, along with Lillian Stannard, Sarah co-founded Impact Arts to continue her teaching in the CDOC and to create and support exhibition opportunities for formerly and currently incarcerated artists.

Lilly Stannard is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and artist-researcher interested in the transformative nature of the arts in various settings. Lilly has worked as an arts administrator and teaching artist within a range of schools and companies, some of which include Spellbound Theatre, Ramapo for Children, and the Verbatim Performance Lab where she developed engaging arts-based curricula for diverse populations. She served as the Director of Programming for the DU Prison Arts Initiative beginning in 2021 where she began her work within the Colorado Department of Corrections. In 2024, along with Sarah McKenzie, Lilly co-founded Impact Arts with the mission of generating arts classes, programs, and exhibitions in and around the criminal-legal system in Colorado. Her writing about artistic transformative justice practices and verbatim theatre work can be found in various publications including The McGill Journal of Education, Routledge Undergraduate Research Series and the Inquiries Journal.