Dance To Be Free

12/19/2025

We are not just impacting incarcerated men and women - but the culture of the institutions we work with are influenced. Devin shares how he showed our videos with new hires to show the humanity of people serving time.

12/18/2025

Here is a profound poem, written by a graduate from a recent workshop in Georgia’s Women’s Prison led by Misa.

We asked the women to respond to a beautiful poem by Maya Luna about giving up on healing trauma.

I stopped making my past my future.

Stopped talking about it.

Excusing it.

Blaming it.

Justifying it.

Falsifying it.

Highlighting the ugly.

Glossing over making it something it wasn’t.

I stopped being the victim or the warrior.

I accepted the accountability and embraced all the ugly,

I threw glitter on the guilt.

I accepted the defeat of being a flawed felon… Finally knowing how to love me.

We are mostly supported by individual donors. If you want to support our mission while dancing, please consider signing up for our subscription site.

Our subscription site has a ton of material from over 10 years including choreography from our prisons. FREE 7 day trial!

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12/18/2025

No class on Christmas Eve but we will be dancing on New Year’s Eve. All Saturday classes are happening💛 Happy Holidays!

12/10/2025

Beautiful memory popped up in my feed from 2022 including a dear friend who is no longer with us Marc Weaver 💔

I think him about him often as he danced with me for over a decade and came to multiple prison visits and donated to our nonprofit generously.

Our subscription site has a ton of material from the past eight years including choreography from our prisons. FREE 7 day trial!

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12/09/2025

We spent with a dozen men at the beacon down in Canon City. There was such vulnerability and accountability in the room.

One man’s response to “When do you feel safe in your body?”was “When my heart rate is stable.” Another man shared that the biggest obstacle he has overcome was his depression.

The prisons do not pay us. We rely mostly on individual donors so please consider contributing.💛

https://www.dancetobefree.org/colorado-gives

Our subscription site has a ton of material from the past eight years including choreography from our prisons. FREE 7 day trial!

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12/08/2025

We just finished day two at the Women’s Prison in Pueblo, where stories of domestic violence and loss are just so profound - beyond comprehension.

We had a really nice group of new women who were so grateful.

New policies and rules have nearly made our program impossible, but the women stay so strong and optimistic.

Tomorrow is and we really appreciate your support as the prisons do not pay us. We have been offering programming in Pueblo for 10 years and have not been paid anything except for money raised by the prisoners from selling 🥧 pies!

Quotes from our participants:
“Mercy feels soft and deep, it looks sad and is much needed these days”

“I feel safer here than I do on the outside”

“The biggest obstacle I’ve overcome is that I woke up from a coma after a year”

Our subscription site has a ton of material from the past eight years including choreography from our prisons. FREE 7 day trial!

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12/06/2025

When dealing with trauma in general, studies show that over half of children and adolescents who have posttraumatic stress disorder go on to experience substance abuse problems. This correlation may indicate why women in prison are more likely than men to be there for drug-related, non-violent offenses. In fact, more than half of women in prisons are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. Women also deal with a greater number of mental health issues in prison than men.
Yet, instead of looking into the root causes of addiction and mental health problems, which often mask a history of abuse or trauma, society instead locks women up and tears families apart. From pat-downs and strip searches, to threats of violence and solitary confinement, the conditions of incarceration that women must face only adds an additional layer of new traumas upon preexisting, latent traumas. Source: The Regulatory Review

Dance To Be Free’s mission is to radically improve the lives of incarcerated people through the healing power of dance. Through our Trauma Informed Dance Teacher Training, we use “Cathartic Choreography” combined with leadership skills – to empower our graduates to conduct peer to peer programming within the prison. Throughout this transformative experience, we teach the nuts and bolts of choreography, pro social skills and group dynamics. 💛💛💛

“I went from 8 medications down to 1.” ~Mary Doflemire, LVCF

The majority of women in prison are holding untreated trauma in their bodies due to prior physical and sexual violence. DTBF believes that by dancing in community, incarcerated women and men are given the chance to heal through cathartic choreography and emotional music. ⭐️

Please help us continue to bring the healing power of dance to more people in prison by donating to DTBF for Colorado Gives Day. And please share this post to help spread the word! 🙏🏻❤️

Link 🔗 below 👇🏻 to donate: https://www.dancetobefree.org/colorado-gives

12/04/2025

Came across this footage from five years ago in the THICK of the pandemic! Our Dad did not want to dance, and I humorously teased him “If you cared about our mission!”😂

11/30/2025

Rising rates of female incarceration reflect disturbing social trends: A criminal justice system that exploits the poor and vulnerable; emphasis on law enforcement and punishment over treatment for substance abuse; throw-away attitudes towards persons with serious mental illness; and misogyny. The push to incarcerate more women ignores the social and psychological forces that often underlie female offending, including higher-than-average rates of lifetime exposure to cumulative trauma, as well as physical and sexual victimization; untreated mental illness; the use of substances to manage distress; and behavioral choices that arise in conjunction with gross economic disparities.

Compared to male inmates, females report higher rates of incidences of physical and sexual abuse, as well as histories of emotional and behavioral disorders. Having led lives where they were sole caregivers for children and with reliance on extremely limited income, women inmates tend to be poorer on average than males. In fact, in situations where cash bail is required as a condition for release, more women languish in jails in pretrial detention without having been convicted of a crime.

Dance To Be Free’s mission is to radically improve the lives of incarcerated people through the healing power of dance. Through our Trauma Informed Dance Teacher Training, we use “Cathartic Choreography” combined with leadership skills – to empower our graduates to conduct peer to peer programming within the prison. Throughout this transformative experience, we teach the nuts and bolts of choreography, pro social skills and group dynamics. 💛💛💛

In November of 2025 DTBF expanded to our 25th prison in Georgia.

“A new meaning of dance, not entrance, but divine suffering, pain, betrayal and hate deep inside unloved, neglected, abused, beaten and r***d but all led me to this point I’m calling it fate.

I dance for the struggle, I dance for the hurt so grateful to feel life and not buried in the dirt I throw my body around and let the rhythm explode let my movements show everyone of my secrets untold

my heart is fighting and it needs to be known so I unleash the beast to the beat of the song unravel the layers as I shed so many tears deeper and deeper until my soul is revealed can’t stop won’t stop,

I push and go hard I’m not ashamed, I own the bruises and scars I want everyone to feel my intensity no more bo***ge I dance to be free.”
~ DTBF Alumna, Lowell CI

The majority of women in prison are holding untreated trauma in their bodies due to prior physical and sexual violence. DTBF believes that by dancing in community, incarcerated women are given the chance to heal through cathartic choreography and emotional music. ⭐️

Please help us continue to bring the healing power of dance to more women in prison by donating to DTBF for Colorado Gives Day on 12/9/25:

https://www.coloradogives.org/organization/Dtbf

And please share this post to help spread the word! 🙏🏻❤️

Change a life. Your contribution helps us bring the healing power of dance to people in prisons nationwide. Omaha, Nebraska - October 2025 Below are graduates from October 2025 at a maximum security Women’s Prison in York, Nebraska. Together, we choreographed, “I fo...