Vitalis Im, Ph.D., LLMSW

Vitalis Im is an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Human Services at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. For the past six years, Dr. Im has been facilitating improvisational theatre, music, and creative writing workshops in Michigan prisons with the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan. An extension of this work, his ethnographic research concerns the politics of artmaking practices in prisons. His primary intervention is to illuminate the ways in which art functions as a technology that both countermands and sustains what he calls the relational violences of confinement.

Dr. Im’s scholarship and pedagogy are deeply informed by his work as a psychotherapist, social worker, and music teacher, particularly his foci on experiential and community-engaged learning and research.