WHO WE ARE

KRISTIN ADAIR
Founder + Creative Director

Kristin is a documentary filmmaker and multimedia artist with a background in law and non-profit advocacy and a lifelong passion for justice and storytelling. She is deeply committed to collaborative media-making that uplifts the voices of community leaders, activists and changemakers. She founded Unchained Stories with an array of creative and advocacy expertise, from visual storytelling to campaign strategy, fundraising and movement-building.

After leaving her job as a non-profit lobbyist in 2011, Kristin helped create a mindfulness and arts program for incarcerated youth. She saw firsthand the combined power of art, healing and storytelling in the juvenile justice space, and and returned to graduate school to hone her skills as a photographer and storyteller and study film production.. In 2018, she produced her first documentary entitled Becoming Free, which looks intimately at the experience of young adults coming home from prison after years or decades behind bars.

Kristin’s work has been featured at venues around the world, including IA&A at Hillyer Gallery, By The People Festival, Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, Washington Project for the Arts, Busboys & Poets, Awareness Film Festival (Los Angeles), the Women's Film Festival (Philadelphia) and the Santa Fe Film Festival, among others, and has been published by the Washington Post, NPR, Yoga Journal and numerous non-profit organizations.

She was selected for the inaugural 2017-2018 cohort of the Halcyon Arts Lab social justice arts fellowship, has been a fellow at Echoing Green and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Kristin has a BS from Georgetown University where she graduated magna cum laude, a JD with honors from George Washington University, and an MA in New Media Photojournalism from Corcoran School of the Arts and Design.