Graduating Seniors: Actor and Changemaker Sophia Lane

When Sophia Lane began her academic career, she knew that she wanted to act and that she was also passionate about justice and social change. Briefly, she considered pursuing law. Then Lane wondered if her talents in the performing arts could play a role in serving communities, but she wasn’t exactly sure how to bring her interests together in a meaningful way.

During her sophomore year, she took a course taught by Professor Kristie Dotson on Afrofuturist novelist Octavia Butler in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS). Dotson, also a professor in the Department of Philosophy, expanded Lane’s worldview.

“Sometimes there are those days in class where when you walk out, you know you have been changed as a person,” Lane says. “This is what most days felt like in Dr. Dotson’s class.”

Lane says that this course also changed the trajectory of her goals, and decided to dedicate more of her academic career to LSA classes like Dotson’s, while continuing to pursue a BFA at Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance (SMTD).

That year, Lane declared a minor in DAAS. She says that this was one of the best decisions she made during her college journey.

“All of the courses I took in DAAS inspired and taught me something new, but one that really stands out was a course taken with Bénédicte Boisseron on Black Ecologies,” Lane says.

This class opened her eyes to the connections between the human and nonhuman species that make up the natural world, sparking a curiosity in animal studies, she says. Lane says she also learned more about the history of slavery and racial discrimination in the class, and how this history is deeply entwined with the carceral system.

“Before this class, I never thought in depth about the experience of Blackness and every aspect of the natural environment and the deep philosophical connections and explorations that take place when studying this intersection.”

This intersection laid the foundation for how she would go on to pair her talent for performance with her commitment to social justice.

“Black Ecologies fired a passion in me. I wondered how nature interacts in a confined and controlled space where one has no agency over one’s experience of nature,” Lane says.

Lane became a creative facilitator with LSA’s Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), bringing this question about nature and confinement into the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in nearby Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Theater from the Inside, Out into the World

Lane’s visits with the incarcerated women of the facility led to a creative workshop that evolved and expanded genres over the course of two years.

Lane and the women wrote, critiqued, and performed short dramatic scenes together about the different animals that the women interacted with in the prison yard.

And with their study of theater emerged the women’s desire to write poetry inspired by the experiences of their confinement, and about aspects of the natural world—birds, rodents, insects, and other creatures—that appeared on the inside with them.

Lane wanted the voices of the women she worked with to be heard on the outside, so she created a podcast with the women so that they could share their experiences and creative work with a larger audience.

After graduation, Lane will continue to bring performing arts into correctional facilities with PCAP. She’s also considering a graduate degree specializing in social change and theater.

Meanwhile, Lane reflects on her work with PCAP with immense gratitude. “My work in PCAP was some of the most informative but also inspiring and deeply human work I have done,” she says. “I learned from incredible people who have been locked away and yet still have so much to share with the world. I was humbled and educated every time I was in their presence.”
 

Photography by Amanda Lane