Michelle’s dissertation focuses on the creative liberation strategies of incarcerated people. As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert, she creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of task forces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration. She has joined Second Chance Educational Alliance as a Senior Research Consultant, the Survivor’s Justice Project, Women Transcending Oral History Project and serves on the boards of Worth Rises and Correctional Association of New York and advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, The Education Trust, A Touch of Light, Urban Institute and ITHAKA's Higher Ed in Prison Project.

She is also board president of Constructing Our Future, a housing organization created by incarcerated women in Indiana. Michelle’s fellowships include Beyond the Bars, Charles Warren Center for Studies at Harvard University, Ford Foundation Bearing Witness with Art for Justice, SOZE Right of Return, Code for America and Mural Arts Rendering Justice, University of Chicago, Practitioner of the People.

Michelle is the author and co-editor of Who Would Believe a Prisoner: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920, published by the New Press. As an artist, Michelle finds ways to funnel her research into theater, dance and photography. Her co-authored play, “The Duchess of Stringtown” was produced in 2017 in Indianapolis and New York, and her installation about weaponized stigma, “Point of Triangulation,” ran in New York in 2019 and 2020, as well as in Philadelphia 2021 with a public mural. Her “Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death and Imprisonment, which explores COVID-19 in prisons, ran in Chicago in 2023."