“As a 70-year-old African American artist, I’m not interested in art for art’s sake. It has to be about social change. It has to be able to save lives.”
Ms. Jones is the Director of the award-winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women and HIV Circle; a performance workshop designed to achieve personal and social transformation with incarcerated women and women living with HIV.
With Medea Project, Jones wanted the women she worked with to “embrace the idea that they have a right to life,” as she told a South African media outlet in 2009. “Women’s lives always belong to other people.” Jones has since hosted workshops around the world: with incarcerated women in South Africa, and with women with HIV in San Francisco.