Hands That Heal: Ilka Perkins and the People's Pottery Project

Ilka Perkins was arrested at 15, sentenced to 15-to-life, and spent nearly 28 years incarcerated before her release in 2019, the same year she co-founded People's Pottery Project. PPP became a full abolitionist ceramics studio in Historic Filipinotown, L.A. employing formerly incarcerated women, trans, and nonbinary individuals. In this conversation, Ilka talks about running a business inside prison as a survival economy, why clay became an unexpected tool for trauma healing, and what it means to build something beautiful with hands the entire world wrote off.