Our Team

Jeff Bohn
Founder & Executive Director

  • Jeff is the Founder and Executive Director of Shining Light. His journey began with a music career as a saxophonist for artists like Rita Moreno, Chita Rivera, and Robert Goulet. His path then ventured into the business world, exploring diverse endeavors such as trucking, banking, and even llama farming.

    In 1999, Jeff’s life found new meaning when he led a youth performing arts group from rural Pennsylvania to present in a tough Chicago youth prison. This profound experience ignited a passion for bringing hope and positive change through the arts to prisons nationwide, from San Quentin to Rikers Island. Over time, his efforts drew the support of Broadway artists, who joined forces with incarcerated men and women to create performances that sparked transformative change.

    In 2020, Jeff’s son Travis completed the University of Pennsylvania's Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program, revealing the scientific foundations behind Shining Light's innovative work in prisons. This discovery led to the evolution of Shining Light’s programs, which now incorporate positive psychology research and tools. Jeff will graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s MAPP program in 2025. 

    As a full-time volunteer leading Shining Light’s team of passionate professionals, Jeff is passionate about helping incarcerated people discover their potential and become contributors to their families and communities. He graduated from Lebanon Valley College and lives on a farm near Hershey, Pennsylvania, with his wife Barbara and their two beloved standard poodles, Romeo and Juliet. In his spare time, Jeff enjoys flower gardening, driving his Model-Ts, and spending quality time with his family.

Kelly Beltran
Program Director / Editor, The Loop

  • Kelly's involvement in the arts and impact began at Lebanon Valley College in PA, where she participated in Shining Light from 1997 to 2000. During this period, she discovered her passion for making a difference through excellence in the arts. Graduating with a B.S. degree in Music Education, Kelly seamlessly transitioned into a role with Shining Light, creating collaborative, multimedia performances tailored for underserved audiences, with a specific focus on correctional settings.

    In 2012, Kelly implemented a national recruiting strategy that expanded Shining Light's reach from local high school students to national college-age and young professional artists. A defining moment in her career occurred in 2015 when she co-led the successful launch of the Impact Workshop program. These workshops involved small teams of professional artists collaborating with residents in various prisons to create original, honest, and high-quality performances aimed at uplifting and encouraging their peers.

    The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 disrupted the Impact Workshops, leading Kelly and the Shining Light team to swiftly pivot. Leveraging her extensive experience and connections in the incarceration field, she spearheaded remote programming initiatives to address extreme isolation. Notable projects included the collaborative "Creations of a Caged Bird" peer-encouragement video project and the four-month writing mentorship program, "Writer’s CoLab."

    A significant achievement during this period was the establishment of "The Loop" magazine. Starting as a short interactive newsletter in May 2020, it evolved into a transformative publication. Recognizing a universal need among incarcerated individuals, Kelly introduced a subscriber program, established a distribution system involving prison staff, and formed a partnership with Edovo, a prison education tablet company. As the Executive Editor of "The Loop," Kelly has overseen its growth to thousands of incarcerated subscribers and electronic tablet readers across hundreds of facilities throughout the United States. Her leadership continues to foster creativity and meaningful human connection for those impacted by incarceration.

Travis Bohn
Program Advisor

  • Travis is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Master of Applied Positive Psychology program and holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Colorado State University-Global Campus. With an unwavering commitment to social justice, Travis has dedicated his career to making a positive impact in various critical domains, including international development, homelessness alleviation, and access to quality food.

    His professional journey includes several transformative years spent in Gulu, Uganda, where he collaborated with a social enterprise that leveraged job creation as a means to combat poverty. In addition, Travis served as a compassionate case manager in Denver, Colorado, supporting formerly homeless individuals in their journey to achieve and maintain stable housing.

    Travis's association with Shining Light has spanned over a decade, dating back to 2007. During this time, he played a pivotal role in implementing a robust monitoring and evaluation framework. Presently, Travis is at the forefront of pioneering and executing innovative programs that harness the principles of positive psychology to empower and uplift the incarcerated community.

    His unwavering dedication to social justice and his expertise in positive psychology make Travis an indispensable asset in driving meaningful change in the lives of those he serves.

Naomi Blount-Wilson
Program Consultant & Facilitator

  • After going to prison in 1982 at Pennsylvania’s Muncy Correctional Institution, Naomi became involved in many programs. She ran the facility’s greenhouse for years (she loves flowers), and also painted, ran buffing machines, and helped beautify the prison’s Chapel. She was Chaplain Reitz's choir director and worked off grounds for many years for both the Superintendent and the Deputy. While incarcerated, she earned an Associate's Degree in Business and a Certificate in Para Legal. In 2018, after 37 years inside, Naomi was granted clemency and released. She now works for Pennsylvania’s Lt. Gov. John Fetterman as a Commutation Specialist, and, as a Shining Light alumni, she serves as our Program Consultant & Program Facilitator.

Joy Attmore
Program Facilitator

Nina Law
Academy Manager

  • Nina has been involved with Shining Light since 2020 while participating in Creations of a Caged Bird, Vol. 2, Creative Mentorship opportunities, and various workshops.

    As a graduate acting student of UCLA, she has had the privilege to teach on both traditional college campuses across NJ, including Rowan University, and inside prison facilities overseen by the NJDOC.

    Nina believes theatre has the rehabilitative power to transform someone’s narrative. While working with students from all walks of life, she bears witness to skills learned from practicing theatre (accountability, connections to thought and feeling, active listening), and encourages the application towards navigation of their daily lives.

    On a personal note, Nina is a dog lover and is butler to a standard poodle. She is close to her family and friends and is passionate about life-long learning and collecting experiences. She also enjoys reading, watching foreign films and being outdoors.

Shelley Delaney
Program Facilitator

  • Shelley Delaney is a theater director, actor, new play dramaturge, and educator. She’s an Emerita Professor of Theater at Ohio University, where prior to retiring, she headed the performance program (encompassing both undergraduate and graduate programs) for more than 15 years. Her classes were focused on actor training and encompassed foundation methodology, technique, on-camera skills, and Shakespeare. Shelley is a proud union actor who has over 100 professional credits – principally in the theater. As a theater director, she loves to work on plays in development, works that focus on women and social change, and Shakespeare. Shelley believes in the power of story to change minds, open hearts, and impact lives. She’s grateful to have been invited to join the Shining Light family in January of 2024, and moved and inspired by the work that she has witnessed.

Sarah Zielinski
Program Facilitator

  • A Pittsburgh native, Sarah attended Point Park University and graduated with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Theatre. After graduating she moved to New York City, where she worked with the NYC Metropolitan Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Doug Varone, Jessica Taylor of DamageDance, Awakening Movement, ZviDance, Caleb Teicher & Company, and Gibney Dance GRIT. Other performing credits include: National Tour of The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, Starlight Express, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and West Side Story as Anybodys. In addition to extensive theatrical training, Sarah is a movement educator dedicated to teaching studies to all levels through dance, Pilates, and the GYROTONIC EXPANSION SYSTEM®.  She is also a licensed Massage Therapist. For over 15 years, Sarah has been a part of kinesthetic education programs in many schools throughout the United States teaching ages 3 years old to collegiate level, as well as professional development workshops for educators and organizations. Sarah first began working with Shining Light in 2016 utilizing dance, movement, and the arts for community building, personal well-being, development, and positive self expression in prisons. Other accreditations include: Foundations of Positive Psychology-Coursera, YPAD (Youth Protection Association for Dance).

Joyce Hinnefeld
Program Facilitator

  • Joyce Hinnefeld, Ph.D., is the author of the short story collections Tell Me Everything (winner of the 1997 Breadloaf Conference Bakeless Prize in fiction) and The Beauty of Their Youth and the novels In Hovering Flight and Stranger Here Below, along with other stories and essays. She is a 1984 graduate of Hanover College, earned her master's degree from Northwestern University, and her PhD at the State University of New York – Albany. Joyce is an Emerita Professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, where, before retiring in 2022, she taught writing classes featuring story exchanges with incarcerated people at the Northampton County Jail and Muncy State Correctional Institute. Through her correspondence with residents at Muncy, she became familiar with the work of Shining Light, as well as the lives and work of Naomi Blount-Wilson, Freedom Horton, and Lee Horton. She is deeply moved, and grateful, to have been brought into the Shining Light family. In addition to her work with Shining Light Joyce enjoys working at a local farm market, Scholl’s Market, in Bethlehem, PA, and acting as the part-time archivist for the Bach Choir of Bethlehem. She is an active member of the Lehigh Valley Friends (Quaker) Meeting, where she served as Meeting. Clerk from 2019 to 2021, and serves on the board of the Bethlehem Area Public Library.

Dormen Lisby
Program Facilitator

  • Dormen Lisby served 25 years and 8 months in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. He was released from prison on April 7th, 2022. He came to know Shining Light in 2018 when he participated in a Workshop at SCI Frackville, serving on the Theatre Team. He also participated in an SL Creative Intensive and had one of his drawings displayed on the very first cover of The Loop prior to it being formally called The Loop. Dormen states, “The Shining Light team and I had become like family while I was in prison.” While incarcerated, he was a deacon in the church, an avid weightlifter, a teacher's assistant in the Education Department, and a certified peer support specialist (CPS). Balancing mind, body, and spirit was very important to him during his time in prison.

    Since returning home to Philadelphia, Dormen has started working as a handyman and floor technician. He also enrolled in a business course at a re-entry nonprofit by the name of Elevation Project, which enabled him to set up an LLC for a small arts business. Known by many for his artistic skills, which he honed while incarcerated, Dormen next plans to procure a studio space to expand his business.

    Participating in church and going to the gym are part of his regular activities. Although he remains on parole, he has managed to fulfill some of the things on his bucket list, such as going to Disney World, visiting Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and taking his family to Kings Dominion in Virginia.

    Dormen also volunteers at churches to feed the homeless and to work with children. He plans to matriculate into college to study rehabilitation health systems and computer technology.

Tracey Donato
Program Facilitator

  • Tracey found Shining Light soon after completing her 23-year sentence at New Jersey’s Edna Mahan Correctional Facility. During her incarceration, she was an active participant in the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prison Consortium (NJ-STEP) program, which provides educational opportunities for individuals inside to earn college credits. Tracey also played a significant role in managing the prison library and later worked in the housekeeping department, ensuring that others received their personal items and that units were well-stocked with supplies.

    Tracey plans to continue her education with a focus on psychology and social work. Her dedication to understanding others' perspectives has given her a new outlook on life, grounded in empathy and fairness. This commitment led her to connect with Shining Light, inspired by her own journey of overcoming incarceration.

    Now living on the Florida coast, Tracey finds joy in the small things many take for granted. She cherishes spending time with loved ones, enjoying privacy, being able to go outside freely, and savoring fresh fruit. Tracey hopes to inspire others to embrace resilience and the power of positive change.

Barb Bohn
Director of Support Services

  • Barb has been working in Shining Light with her husband, Jeff, since it began. After earning her B.S. in Music Education from Lebanon Valley College, Barb went on to work as a music educator in public schools for nine years and then managed a large family restaurant for three years. She also invested 11 years in pastoring a local church start.

    Currently, she assists in strategic planning for Shining Light, and provides various types of support where needed. Barb's passion to welcome all and provide new perspectives on the criminal justice system, grace, and transformation infuses all her work for Shining Light.

Angelica Richie
Production Advisor

  • Angelica is an interdisciplinary artist who knows the power of narrative to communicate and connect. She graduated with a theater degree from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and promptly moved to New York City where she currently resides. Her stage credits include multiple national tours, improv comedy, and developmental labs. Alongside her performance career, she has cultivated a writing portfolio that includes publication with ESPN and Backstage. She began working with Shining Light as a team leader for dance and theater in 2018. As the organization has expanded to digital mediums and virtual collaborations, Angelica has worked to develop and produce creative projects with artists nationwide that reach and represent our participants.

Jeff Arntz
Technical Advisor

  • Jeff has served in the tech areas (sound, lights, video) of Shining Light since seeing us at his church in 2003. An electrician by vocation, Jeff has served as the tech director at Gravel Hill United Methodist Church for many years. He also has provided sound and other tech support for a variety of area musicians and productions.

Our Board

  • Rikers Island, New York City’s jail complex, is billed as the world’s largest penal colony, sustained an average daily inmate population of 14,000 men and women. Edmund Duffy started with the NYC Department of Correction in 1986 and spent his 29-year career at Rikers. He worked his way through the ranks while serving during much of his career as adjunct faculty to the Correction Academy in developing newly-assigned staff to supervisory ranks. As a captain, he oversaw the department's largest mental health unit. As an assistant deputy warden and deputy warden, he was responsible for security at the department's largest facilities, and as deputy warden in command, he oversaw the department's hospital prison wards. He has received numerous distinctions, including recognition as the department's deputy warden of the year and an award from the correction officer's union for outstanding leadership.

    In 2008, following a highly publicized homicide with staff complicity, Duffy was elevated to warden and assigned to the very same Rikers Island facility where he commenced his Rikers Island Warden tenure, serving in four separate facilities until his 2015 retirement. He has been interviewed by the New York Daily News, the City Journal, and CorrectionsOne.com, an online resource for the corrections industry. Throughout his career as a warden, Duffy fought to expand programs, inclusive of mental health services to inmate populations and educational opportunities for incarcerated adolescents and adults. While assigned to the most challenging facilities on Rikers, Duffy was instrumental in establishing an Honor Program, which utilized a curriculum, classrooms and numerous community-based volunteers to provide moral rehabilitation while preparing inmates to reenter the community. Edmund, upon retiring, resumed his education pursuits, completing a Bachelor of Science degree at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Edmund continues to serve on several prison ministry boards while he and his wife, Janinne, remain active in their local church and community.

  • Leona Brandwene, MAPP, serves as the Associate Director for University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program and for the Applied Positive Psychology (APOP) undergraduate certificate at Penn. She helps oversee program strategy, operations, planning, and development, and works with the Positive Psychology Education (PPCEd) team, faculty, and visiting faculty to ensure a world-class educational experience for students. In 2021, Leona was awarded the College of Liberal and Professional Studies' Award for Distinguished Teaching in Professional Graduate Programs for her excellence in teaching in the MAPP program. Along with her work in positive psychology, Leona is an executive coach and consultant in health care, with a particular emphasis on building cultures that enable high-performing teams. She loves running, cycling, family, and supporting youth sports, particularly for her daughter, Sophie, who runs cross country, swims, and competes in elite draft-legal triathlon. She lives in Lititz, PA with Sophie and her husband Josh.

  • Anne Ashby Gilbert is a journalist and film producer whose work has appeared in Fortune Small Business, Your Company Magazine, and Office.com, where she wrote a twice-weekly small business advice column. She is also the author of The Fight for City and Suburban Homes, a history of the ten-year battle to save a 100-year old tenement housing complex in New York City. She served as staff writer and producer at the New York Center for Visual History, a documentary production company that produced landmark films series on the Arts for PBS, including American Cinema, the poetry series Voices and Visions, as well as one-hour biographies on literary luminaries such as William Styron. More recently, she produced and edited a non-fiction film profile of US Ambassador Richard Gardner entitled "Portrait of a Professor," which celebrated Gardner's five decade teaching career at the Columbia University Law School. Educated at Barnard College, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is a founding member of the Lincoln Center Family Circle, as well as parent mentor for the Lincoln Center Student Arts Council, both of which are dedicated to developing new and diverse audiences for the arts.

  • Rachel Tracie, Ph.D., has participated with Shining Light as a Theater Team Leader and Academy Facilitator since 2017. She is passionate about the arts and higher education in prison and regularly teaches with the Prison Education Project in Southern California. She received a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London and an M.A. in Drama from the University of Alberta and her book Christina Reid: Through and Beyond the Troubles was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2018. Rachel was honored as a 2021 Recipient of the PEN America / L’Engle Rahman Mentorship Award for her efforts as a mentor with a writer incarcerated in a Massachusetts prison. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Theatre at Biola University in California.

  • On May 31, 1993, Dennis and Lee Horton were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for a murder they did not commit. Prior to their arrest, neither had ever been arrested. Both were employed and living productive lives. Lee was married with four children, and Dennis was engaged to be married.

    Subsequently, they were sent to a state prison where they remained for the next 27 years and 10 months fighting to prove their innocence. Although they were supposed to die in prison, Lee and Dennis decided that every moment they spent in prison would be used productively, and because of something their grandmother told them, they helped as many other prisoners as humanly possible over the course of their incarceration.

    They were students, then teachers, instructors, mentors, facilitators, and creators of programs and events for reentry and to inspire change. They worked as Certified Peer Support Specialists and Wellness Recovery Action Plan Facilitators, helping hundreds of men deal with mental health and other crisis situations. They lived full lives inside as community activists, freedom fighters, organizers, playwrights, and motivational speakers. While in prison, they contracted COVID-19, but survived.

    On February 12, 2021, they achieved an impossible task by obtaining their release on the basis of an actual innocence commutation application. Since their release, they worked as political organizers for the John Fetterman campaign for United States Senate and were trained as Advance Level II, WRAP Facilitators. And with their unique insights, they are helping shape the programming here at Shining Light.

  • Liz, SVP of Design & Research at Impact Performance Group, has 25 years of experience leading a team that specializes in research, program design, development, and facilitation of custom leadership, sales, and service solutions infused with positive psychology that enables organizations to deepen client relationships and ignite employee engagement. Liz works extensively with Fortune 500 companies to enhance sales productivity, increase employee well-being, elevate service effectiveness, and enable leadership and coaching skills in financial markets, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail industries.

    Liz is an ICF Certified Coach, Certified Practitioner in Appreciative Inquiry, Strengthscope Practitioner/Coach, Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Coach, and Transcend/Self-Actualization Coaching certified. Liz is the Past President of the International Positive Psychology Association’s Work & Org Division. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Boston College, a Master of Business Administration from New York University, and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

    Liz is a past president of the Work & Organizations Division of IPPA, has been a member of IPPA for 15 years, and attended eight World Congresses. She presented at the 2023 World Congress and the 2021 Evidence in Action Conference and Idea Starter Symposium. Liz received the prestigious James O. Pawelski Positive Catalyst Award at the 2021 IPPA World Congress for her contributions to IPPA and the WOD Division. Liz currently serves on the WOD leadership team, supporting Communities of Practice and Post-Truth work.

    She resides in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with her husband, Joe, and her three children.