Who Is Gina Dent? Inside Her Life, Partnership with Angela Davis, and Radical Abolition Work
In recent years, Dent has directed her intellectual energy into Visualizing Abolition, an ambitious cross-disciplinary research and public arts project launched at UC Santa Cruz in collaboration with art history professor Rachel Nelson. Backed by substantial grants from the Mellon Foundation, including an initial $3.85 million grant awarded in 2021, the initiative explores how narrative, visual media, and public exhibitions can shift cultural common sense away from cages.
In March 2023, Dent and Davis took the stage for the public panel "Imagining Freedom," detailing how the Visualizing Abolition curriculum reshapes university and community education. Dent emphasized that mass incarceration persists partly because visual cultures condition the public to equate barbed wire and armed patrol cars with public order. Visualizing Abolition partners with incarcerated artists, community organizers, and museums to exhibit alternative visions of collective safety. By integrating this work into undergraduate and graduate programs, Dent continues to train new cadres of researchers to approach abolition not merely as policy, but as creative practice.
