Tessy Seward is Co-Founder and Co-Director of Maine Inside Out. She grew up in Downeast Maine, with a childhood love for theater, and now has been creating and teaching theater as a force for social change for almost 20 years. Her work includes therapeutic theater workshops for resettled teens in Baton Rouge after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Portland-based projects at Learning Works, the Preble Street Teen Center and Portland High School, and Maine Inside Out workshops at Maine Department of Corrections’ Women’s Reentry Center and Long Creek Youth Development Center. Tessy studied with Theater of the Oppressed founder Augusto Boal at the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory in New York City. She has a Masters Degree in Counseling from the University of Southern Maine, with training in group facilitation, expressive arts therapy, multi-cultural counseling, non-violent communication, and crisis intervention, and a B.A. in English from Williams College.
 
Maine Inside Out is a nonprofit arts organization based in Portland, Maine. MIO artists facilitate theater workshops in correctional facilities with incarcerated youth, and continue that work in the community with youth returning home after incarceration. In the past five years, MIO has worked with more than 60 young men and women incarcerated at Maine’s juvenile correctional facility, Long Creek Youth Development Center, to create and share multiple original works of theater with more than 5,000 audience members around the state. MIO also offers weekly "outside" groups in Biddeford, Lewiston, and Portland to provide mentoring, transitional employment, peer support and creative community engagement opportunities for reintegrating youth.