Founding member

Kamisha Thomas

RAG Cofounder | Interdisciplinary Artist | Filmmaker | Writer

Founding member

Kamisha Thomas is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, and installation artist whose work examines incarceration, healing, grief, survival, identity, and transformation. Drawing from her own lived experiences and the experiences of justice-impacted communities, she creates narrative films, immersive installations, and written works that challenge dominant narratives while centering humanity and collective liberation.

Kamisha is the co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Returning Artists Guild, a national artist-led organization supporting justice-impacted artists through creative practice, peer connection, and direct support. Her work has been exhibited nationally and includes the films BANG!, Silence is Consent, and The Indictment, as well as the installations Coming Home and Leave Your Dignity on the Floor. Through both her artistic and organizational leadership, she works to expand opportunities for artists impacted by incarceration while advancing abolition through storytelling and community building.

BANG!
Produced, written and directed from Dayton Correctional Institution
Silence is Consent: The Crime
 Created with funding from Right of Return USA – Year 3 Fellow
Silence is Consent: The Indictment
 Created with funding from Art For Justice Fund

Artist statement

Through narrative films, writing, and installations, I create stories rooted in lived experience, both my own and the experiences of the people and communities around me. My work emerges from places of rupture: incarceration, separation, grief, survival, healing, and the ongoing process of becoming.

Through fictional narratives grounded in real experiences, I ask audiences to examine themselves, their assumptions, and the systems that shape our lives. I am interested in the spaces where personal narrative intersects with collective experience, where art can challenge, disrupt, and build understanding across differences.

Creative practice has been a pathway to healing, connection, and liberation in my own life. Through storytelling, I seek to bear witness to lives and experiences often overlooked while imagining new possibilities rooted in empathy, community, and transformation. I create because stories have the power to change people, and people have the power to change the world.

Calendar items featuring Kamisha Thomas

September 7, 2019 | Columbus, Ohio

Cloud City

Cloud City 614 featured an immersive RAG installation using art and interactive experiences to explore incarceration in Columbus, Ohio.

September 22, 2019 | Columbus, Ohio

Grind/Time

RAG’s first gallery exhibition, Grind/Time uses contemporary art to spark dialogue about mass incarceration, the prison system and societal re-entry.

February 2020 | Hamilton, OHio

Through the Wire

Through the Wire featured art by currently and formerly incarcerated Ohio artists at the Strauss Gallery in Hamilton, Ohio.

November 4, 2021 to January 14, 2022 | Columbus, Ohio

Bridging the Distance

Bridging the Distance featured art and poetry by incarcerated Ohio artists exploring isolation, barriers and human connection during COVID-19.

June 22 to September 14, 2024 | Cincinnati, Ohio

Imagining Abolition: Family Reunion

Imagining Abolition: Family Reunion featured incarcerated, formerly incarcerated and exonerated Ohio artists exploring prison abolition through art.

November 25, 2025 to January 30, 2026 | Columbus, Ohio

Imagining Abolition: Blood, Sweat, and Tears Too

Imagining Abolition: Blood, Sweat, and Tears Too features RAG artists exploring life beyond incarceration, Nov 25, 2025–Jan 30, 2026, Columbus, Ohio.

February 26, 2025 | Worthington, Ohio

A World Reimagined: The Work of Abolition

A World Reimagined: The Work of Abolition was a Feb. 26, 2025 panel discussion in Worthington, Ohio, held alongside the Home Free exhibition.