Murrell, 67, taught sculpture and three-dimensional design at Georgia State from 1984 to 2007. In those 23 years, he helped make the campus art studio at 184 Edgewood Ave. a beehive of activity in Atlanta, not just for his students, but for renowned artists around the city.

The studio was an abandoned grocery store that Murrell’s colleague, the internationally acclaimed sculpture artist George Beasley, turned into a classroom with Murrell’s help. It was on the outskirts of campus, away from the mainstream, and that’s what they preferred for creative independence.

“Being on the fringe definitely helped, as far as having an open studio,” Murrell says. “Local artists, some well-known, would come and hang out. Artists like Radcliffe Bailey, Donald Locke and Johnny Gardner would often talk to students, and it was beneficial to both groups. I called it my unpaid visiting artist program.”

Murrell says he and Beasley were “art cowboys,” modestly funded but able to make things happen in their creative cradle.

“Most of the tools we got were from state surplus and we had to rebuild them,” he says. “And I remember many times going to the director and asking for $150 for bandsaw blades. Sometimes it would happen, sometimes it wouldn’t.”

Their independent spirit and initiative showed up in their students’ work. Murrell remembers taking Georgia State students to New York and telling them their work was better than what was in the galleries there.

“It was just a wonderful, creative, open atmosphere at the Edgewood studio,” Murrell says. “I don’t think we could do this today, but we would give the grad students a key to the studio and often I would show up in the morning for an 8 o’clock class and there would be three or four students leaving that had been there all night.

“Some local artists saw that this was a vortex of art energy and just came on down to hang out.”

Watch the trailer for “Michael Murrell: Art, Nature and Catawampus.” 

Several weeks into her first semester as an English Ph.D. student in 2008, Higinbotham was standing in line for coffee in the now-demolished Kell Hall building when one of her professors, Paul Schmidt, asked, “So what do you want to do with this Ph.D., Sarah?”

Higinbotham is not sure where the next thing she said came from, or why she said it.

“What I think I really want to do is teach inside a prison,” Higinbotham told Schmidt, a Victorian literature professor.

Unexpectedly, her professor’s eyes lit up. Schmidt told her he had a friend in New York who taught in prison, and that she should contact him.

She did, and with his advice, Higinbotham wrote letters to 14 prisons asking if she could teach English literature to prisoners. The first response she got was from Phillips State Prison Warden Timothy C. Ward, who now oversees all of Georgia’s prisons as commissioner of the Department of Corrections. Ward capped the number of students at 15 per class and there was an immediate waiting list for the noncredit course (students now receive college credit).

Higinbotham had to go through vetting, not just by the Department of Corrections, but by Georgia State as its representative. Schmidt and Regents’ Professor Randy Malamud, a professor of modern literature, supported her initiative with the school’s administration.

Higinbotham started Common Good Atlanta in January 2009 at Phillips State Prison in Buford, Ga., and Schmidt was the first person, other than herself, to teach a class.

“By advocating for these college classes inside prison, it really demonstrates the way that higher education shouldn’t be restricted on the basis of socioeconomic privilege, or your background,” Higinbotham says.

Jacobs illuminates all this in his film on Common Good Atlanta, which operates now in four prisons and a downtown Atlanta facility. There are at least 20 professors from Georgia State teaching in the prisons and dozens more from colleges across Georgia and neighboring states.

“I have so much respect for Georgia State for making this happen,” Higinbotham says. “And the professors, all of them, were hungry to make a difference.”

Taft, Higinbotham’s friend from grad school, joined the crusade in 2010 and is now the academic director of Common Good Atlanta.

“I would say English 1101 is a place where you teach leadership skills because your writing and communication are ways to persuade others to follow your call to action,” Taft says. “That’s what’s going on. The college student might not understand it at the time, but eventually they will take advantage of the seed we planted.”

Jacobs’ films attest to the authenticity of Common Good Atlanta and Murrell. Everything they say and do, they believe.

“Tell a good story, that’s what I live by,” Jacobs says. “What’s the best story I can tell about this person that respects their work, their life? If you’re lucky, you get one shot at having your story told and, as a journalist, you have a responsibility to tell it right, as well as you can, and as honestly as you can.

“The thing with Michael, Sarah and Bill is they are interested in storytelling in their own way. They’re so focused on their work that they don’t have time to just think about themselves or promote themselves. We live in the age of self-promotion and to find people who are not living that life and can be role models, that’s good, powerful stuff.”

Watch the trailer for “Common Good Atlanta.”