Halim Flowers, 2023

Halim Flowers standing in front of his works at Ford Foundation Gallery’s No Justice Without Love exhibition.

Flowers is a Washington-D.C.-based visual artist and poet. In 1997, at the age of 16, Flowers was charged as an adult and sentenced to 40 years to life. His experiences as a minor inside the DC Department of Corrections were captured in the Emmy award-winning documentary Thug Life In DC. While incarcerated in 2018, he co-founded the social entrepreneurial media production company Unchained Media Collective with filmmaker Kristin Adair, with the goal of disrupting mass incarceration by telling the stories of those who are directly impacted by the criminal justice system. A year later, he was released after successfully petitioning for resentencing after 22 years behind bars.