Ryan Keesling

Founder & Executive Director - Free Write Arts & Literacy

Ryan Keesling is an educator by training, artist by will, and prison abolitionist by necessity.

As founder of Free Write Arts & Literacy, Ryan has worked in locked facilities, such as the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, and in the community with criminalized youth and young adults for two decades. He specializes in designing arts-driven, healing-centered, liberatory pedagogies with criminalized youth as they move through and away from experiences with incarceration. Ryan is nationally recognized for his work as an arts educator, presenting at conferences such as Create Justice at Carnegie Hall and the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. He has trained hundreds of pre-service teachers and social workers at National Louis University, Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Loyola University, and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. As a steering committee member and hub director for Envisioning Justice, Ryan connects Free Write and partner organizations with national conversations, strategies, and resources. As an educator-turned-director of a non-profit, Ryan challenges the colonial structures embodied by philanthropy, acknowledging and calling out the connections between the Non-Profit and Prison Industrial Complexes.

As a DJ, producer, and audio engineer known as Ryan Searchl1te, Ryan has toured nationally and internationally while holding down DJ residencies on WNUR 89.3 FM and throughout Chicago’s underground dance music and club culture. He brings these skills to his students through Free Write’s Sound & Vision (S&V) program. S&V is committed to social justice and employment equity in the arts industry. S&V hires and trains alumni of Free Write Arts & Literacy and other young adults who have historically been excluded from the field, creating pathways into an industry that is in need of a diverse, young workforce.