Sandra Barefoot has worked for over 13 years leading and programme managing our prison programme RESTORE. Her extensive experience in facilitating group processes exploring trauma and pain led her to question with colleagues the place shame plays in how we see ourselves and others.

In 2018 she undertook a joint research fellowship with Ruth Chitty under The Griffins Society to investigate explicitly how shame impacts the behaviours of women of lived experience of prison and discover the inner life force, resilience and ways women made meaning in order to survive. As a dance artist, Sandra understood the phenomena of shame lives within the body and as a result, she also undertook Masters studies in 2019 at the Trinity of Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, exploring the embodiment of shame and resilience as a practice of research.

Angela Findlay is an Anglo-German artist and public speaker who has spent much of her career teaching art in prisons. Her time ‘behind bars’ in Germany and later as Arts Co-ordinator for the London-based Koestler Arts charity informed her research into the intergenerational consequences of unresolved trauma, guilt and shame.

For over a decade, she has been lecturing and writing on the topic as well as on war remembrance, resolution and reconciliation. She has co-facilitated and brought creative applications to The Forgiveness Project’s prison RESTORE programmes, hosted practical art therapy training at Action Trauma’s 2021 Trauma Recovery Summit and spoken at the MADNICITY summit at the 2022 Venice Biennale. In My Grandfather’s Shadow is her first book and is published by Penguin Transworld.