About the Film

Growing up, Kristal watched nearly every man in her life disappear to prison. She channeled that struggle into keeping families connected, both as a social worker and with her van service that drives families to visit loved ones in far-off prisons. But when Kristal’s dad and brother return to Philly, her happiness meets the realization that release doesn’t always mean freedom. Passionate, funny and resilient, Kristal remains determined to carve out a different future — for herself and for her young nephew, Nyvae. Part observational documentary, part family album, A Woman on the Outside is a tender portrait of one family striving to love in the face of a system built to break them. website

Zara Katz (Director/Producer) is a filmmaker and photo producer for editorial, documentary and branded content, specializing in crafting character-driven visual stories. Katz is currently Photography Director at NBC News.com, and has worked with outlets including The New York Times Lens blog, Time magazine, Medium, The Guardian U.S., Pop-Up Magazine and Lifetime/A+E Networks. She was the Senior Photography Producer on a Getty Images/Dove campaign photographed by more than 100 women and non-binary photographers, which won the Silver Glass Lion at Cannes in 2019. 

Lisa Riordan Seville (Director/Producer) is an award-winning reporter and independent filmmaker whose stories explore how money, power and policy shapes the lives of everyday people. Her investigative and enterprise work has appeared across NBC News platforms, on BuzzFeed News, The Guardian U.S., Lifetime/A+E Networks and WNYC Radio. It has been recognized with a Peabody, a Hillman Award and a Sigma Delta Chi from the Society of Professional Journalists, among others. Her most recent piece was a cover story for New York Magazine about the deaths of 15 men in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex. 

Kristal Bush is the protagonist of the documentary film A Woman on the Outside.

Jose Di Lenola, Clemency Campaign Director of RAPP

At the age of 16, Jose was sentenced to 26 1/3 years to life for second-degree murder and served eighteen of those years in Attica prison and various correctional facilities. While incarcerated he worked as a rehabilitation peer educator in relapse prevention, anger management, and mental health; and mentored at-risk youth diversionary programs. Jose co-founded and served as President of the Attica Lifer’s Organization and consulted several organizations. Jose was released in December 2021, has his own consultation business, Carceral Consultation, and is the Clemency Campaign Director for the Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP).

TeAna Taylor, Co-Director of Policy & Communications and Capital Region Organizer at RAPP

TeAna advocates for children of incarcerated parents, informed by their father’s nearly two decades of incarceration and working with We Got Us Now and the HALT Solitary Campaign. They have been engaging their community in restorative justice work for the past five years. They created and maintained a peer mediation program at a local middle school, leading mediations between youth, parents, and teachers; facilitating circles that ranged from community building within classrooms to repairing harm between community members; providing conflict coaching sessions for students; and training students in peer mediation and conflict resolution. TeAna has also facilitated circles to address issues faced by students and faculty of color at their alma mater, SUNY Schenectady, that led to policy change for a more inclusive and diverse campus. 

The mission of the Chris Wilson Foundation is to transform the incarceration system by providing better and more sustainable programming for incarcerated individuals that centers personal relationships, resilience, development and agency. Our Master Plan Program focuses on trauma and resilience, systemic oppression and mass incarceration and goal-setting and reentry. The program is being implemented in three states, and is currently running at the Capital District Youth Detention Center in Albany. 

The Release Aging People in Prison/RAPP Campaign is a grassroots advocacy organization created and led by formerly incarcerated people and family members of people in prison. We work to end mass incarceration and promote racial justice through the release of aging people in prison and those serving long sentences. We work to dismantle the racist policies of mass incarceration by expanding the use of parole, compassionate release, clemency, and other forms of release in New York State. We work with other organizations across the country to end life imprisonment in the United States. By organizing community power to free incarcerated elders, we work to uproot a system of endless punishment that fuels mass incarceration and damages Black and other communities of color.

The mission of Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York is to provide high quality, effective legal representation and assistance to indigent prisoners, help them to secure their civil and human rights and advocate for more humane prisons and for a more humane criminal justice system.

The Center for Law and Justice recognizes that the criminal justice system in the United States has a history of racism and classism, stemming from both laws and practices, that continues to this day. It is the center’s mission to reform the criminal justice system and dismantle its oppressive elements. 

The Center for Law and Justice aims to eliminate the gap between law and justice by creating an equitable criminal justice system which values all human life and acknowledges community members as partners in public safety. The center seeks to achieve this goal through amplifying the voices of marginalized people and communities, while educating and empowering those same communities to demand an end to mass criminalization, mass incarceration, and systemic oppression.

Capital Area Against Mass Incarceration (CAAMI) seeks to challenge and dismantle mass incarceration and the systems of oppression that sustain it. We do this through coordinated actions and by opening the dialogue about mass incarceration and the criminal injustice system in a way that is empowering to all individuals and communities affected by them. CAAMI defines “mass incarceration” as both the excessive quantity of people caught in the criminal justice system, and the racially discriminatory and cruel quality of the current punitive model of social control. Police brutality, racially disparate sentencing, and post-prison discrimination function as a self-reinforcing system that damages communities.