About The Wrong Questions Project
Our Mission
The Wrong Questions Project is a survivor-led, survivor-centred, and surviving-family-centred multi-arts and documentary project built on a simple but demanding premise: if we keep asking victims, survivors, and surviving family members the wrong questions, we will keep producing the wrong answers. And the wrong answers do not end violence. They perpetuate and enable it.
The project exposes how victim-blaming questions function as the lexicon of the perpetrator in public form. They appear as curiosity, fact-finding, concern, procedure, or common sense. They are not. They are thinly veiled accusations that relocate the crime into the victim's body, clothing, choices, memory, fear, silence, delay, or attempts to survive. They ask us to account for violence we did not cause.
When the victim does not survive, the questions do not stop. They are redirected toward the people left behind: mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, partners, friends, and loved ones who are made to answer for violence they did not cause and could not have controlled.
The truth is this: it was never our fault. And the wrong questions are dangerous because they yield the wrong answers.
Words as Weapons
Refusing the Grammar of Impunity
The Wrong Questions Project begins with language because language is one of the first places impunity is built. Language assigns roles, distributes doubt, and offers ready-made scripts for minimizing harm. It is where violence is softened into misunderstanding, where coercion is reframed as conflict, where terror is renamed as volatility, where institutional indifference is treated as neutral, and where victims, survivors, and surviving family members are made to appear responsible for crimes committed by perpetrators.
This project refuses that grammar. It refuses the lexicon of the perpetrator. It refuses the credibility hierarchy that requires survivors to become smaller, calmer, more palatable, and more procedurally acceptable in order to be believed.
The work is not only about what happened. It is about what happens after: who is believed, who is doubted, who is protected, who is silenced, who is made to carry the burden of proof, whose account is treated as knowledge, and whose loved one is made to disappear inside procedure, immunity, misclassification, media narrative, or institutional self-protection.
This is the credibility inversion the exhibits make visible, in plain sight: the survivor is not believed; the perpetrator is. We place the record beside the disbelief—the dashcam footage, the 911 call, the interview, the managed file—so that the inversion cannot hide. We do not argue that it happened. We let it happen in front of you.
Who We Are: The Curatorial Team
The exhibit modules in The Wrong Questions Project are co-curated and produced by survivors, surviving family members, and professional collaborators, grounding each installation in direct witness, case documentation, and curatorial oversight.
Mary Simmerling, Ph.D.; Suzy Boylan, J.D.; Jen Murphy, enrolled member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe and MMIW/P Project; Denise Huskins Quinn, DPT, and Aaron Quinn, DPT; Nichole Schmidt and Jim Schmidt, of the Gabby Petito Foundation; Justin Bradshaw, Becky Bradshaw, and Angie Giorgis, of A New Dawn: Remembering Macey Dawn; Bevin Llanes, in remembrance of Meghan Kiefer; Chris McGhee; Pennie Nichols, Ph.D.; and Donna Zucker, M.F.A.
Locally hosted exhibits often include local guest curators who are essential partners in this work.