Shaheem Sanchez wasn’t always a choreographer and activist, but he was certainly born a dancer. Nothing could stop the beat — not even losing his hearing at age four. “My whole life, I’ve been dancing,” he says. “I love the feeling of the music.”

He remembers loud tunes playing in his mother’s car, saying he was always “feeling that vibe, that hype” as the vibrations moved through the seats. Even his father, who died before Shaheem was born, passed down some grooving genes. “One day, my family showed me a video of him when he was dancing,” he says, and that’s when it all clicked — “Makes sense where I get it from!”

Shaheem was officially a dancer by age 11. He never struggled to find the rhythm — but finding people who understood his personality was another matter. Despite his energetic attitude and reputation as “the class clown,” Shaheem struggled to connect with peers who mocked his voice and speech.

Of course, it turns out he didn’t need them. Shaheem went on to make a place in the artistic and deaf communities, appearing in the Oscar-nominated “Sound of Metal” and as a host of amazing TikTok videos.

It’s all because he’s been feeling the beat — literally. “If I like the beat, I feel it. Touch it. I put my hands on it,” he explains. From there, he picks up the rhythm and creates dances, which he teaches to learners in the deaf community and beyond.

That’s right: Despite being bullied for his hearing, particularly in middle school, Shaheem put his best dancing foot forward and is now using his experiences to make a difference. “I want to bridge the gap between the deaf and hearing communities,” he says. “We’re here to show the world we can do anything.”

In a small town in the heart of Kentucky, oxycontin has run rampant like wildfire. So when a young man came to the Appalachian School of Luthiery looking for something besides drugs to occupy his hands and mind, founder Doug Naselroad knew at once that the stakes were high. It was time to start saving lives.

In just a few years, Doug had formed a program called “The Culture of Recovery” to help those in similar situations. “Making musical instruments is mystical. It’s magical,” he says — and now, it’s an important part of addiction recovery. Judges send people to the program as an alternative to incarceration, helping them “build lives one guitar at a time.”

“I’m really proud of my guys,” he says. He knows the stories of every man working at his Appalachian Stringed Instrument Company — maybe because they’re not too different from his own. As a working musician in the 1970s, he says he got into a lot of trouble with substance abuse. “That’s where I meet these guys. ‘I know how you feel, bud.’”

But the program runs even deeper than that. After a devastating flood in 2022, there wasn’t much luthiery to be done — but there was a lot of fixing. Doug and his men grabbed shovels and helped their town get back on its feet, giving back to the community through meaningful work. As he describes it, they were “helping damaged people clean up a damaged town in an economically damaged area.”

“I do feel like this work is a mission,” he says. “How can that not be transformative?”

John Bramblitt says he could draw before he could walk. “I had done art literally every day of my life,” he recalls.

But being born with severe epilepsy meant much of that art was created in a hospital bed. “I was having emotions that I couldn’t deal with, that I couldn’t understand,” he says. “I couldn’t put it into words, but I could draw it out. All you need is a broken pencil and a scrap of paper!”

When massive seizures eventually led to vision loss, John remembers feeling angry and depressed. “I just thought my life was over,” he says. Fortunately for him and everyone who would benefit from his inspirational work in the years to come, that wasn’t true.

Soon, John learned his way around the streets near his college apartment. That’s when he had a life-changing realization: “If I could do that in the real world, surely I can navigate something much simpler — like a canvas.”

He started out drawing just one square, but soon, he was creating breathtaking works of art — not despite his blindness, but defined by it. “After the eyesight, art changed for me,” he recalls. His new process relies on touch, technology and creatively textured paints to capture his world on the canvas.

Now, this visionary without vision works out of “Bramblitt’s Yellow Dog Art Gallery,” where everything hanging on the walls was created by someone with a disability. Here, he teaches art classes to people of all abilities and interests. “I found that if I go somewhere and I’m doing a workshop or talking to people, they want to find out more about disability,” he explains. After all, says John, “Art teaches us a lot.”

Chicago violence changed the course of James C. Warren’s life. Now he’s an inmate in the Illinois Department of Corrections — but he’s also a playwright.

His community of incarcerated storytellers, the Andre Theater Collective, wrote and produced a play called “A Story of Violence.” After a successful years-long run in the prison system, James wanted to share his message with other communities, particularly those at risk of ending up behind bars or worse. That’s how he connected with a trio of old high school friends.

Encouraged by filmmaker Andre Muir, who made a short film called “4 Corners” on a similar topic, the group is tapping into an activist-oriented arts community to tell James’ story. “All of us have a personal connection with this. I have a brother who was in and out of jail,” says Andre. And the trio agrees: “It could have been us.”

Before his arrest, James had lost two cousins to violence. “That was like one of the hardest things I ever went through,” he recalls. His growing “kill or be killed” mentality and substance abuse eventually led to a shooting at a college party — and although the victim survived, James was sentenced to 15 years in prison. “I feel a lot of remorse and regret,” he says. But he’s also looking at the blessings that have come from this — like the chance to write and share “A Story of Violence.”

On the other side of the bars, Andre and his team are casting formerly incarcerated actors to help bring the play to life. It’s an important message that crosses borders and blurs boundaries — a story that Andre says “puts the narrative back” in the hands of people in the prison system.

“Syrian heart, Midwest soul.” That’s how Bassel Almadani describes Bassel & The Supernaturals, a band that makes “soulfully-driven music” that its frontman says taps into the pain and sorrow he’s felt. As a first-generation Syrian-American, he explains how “people don’t hear enough about that narrative, and that’s part of what we’re here to do.”

Although he wasn’t in his parents’ homeland when violence erupted starting in 2012, Bassel recalls how his aunt’s house in Syria was annihilated with bombs and his young cousin was killed in a fight she had nothing to do with. “I think that’s what people never seem to understand, and what we’re constantly addressing in our shows,” he says. “It’s not like there was a rebel group coming to throw the government over. It was people like you and me — civilians.”

He says that’s where things took a turn for him, and he felt the need to share these stories. “I don’t have the choice to be helpless right now. What I do have is a microphone.” As he worked through the creative challenge of staying authentic when he’s not “there” himself, he created safe spaces for people to learn with him — and to ask questions from across cultures.

The goal is to help rebuild a better future for Syrians. But now, with a collective of musicians all tied to the cause, Bassel & The Supernaturals are reaching refugees of all backgrounds. Bassel even shares “art as a form of healing” with kids from his culture and others, all of whom came to America before they got the chance to formally learn Arabic. “It’s such a beautiful experience,” he says.

These artists are incredible creative minds, blurring the lines between individual expression and community storytelling. They represent different disciplines and parts of the world, but each one taps into the experience of being human — something we all go through alone and together.

As an artist himself, Dulé isn’t surprised to see that this work has power. But Shaheem, Doug, John, Andre and Bassel are only small parts of the much larger story he discovers. Fortunately, he’s got his tap shoes on and he’s ready to keep exploring expression, determination and the transformative energy of creation.

You can learn more about all of these creators — and plenty of others — in “The Express Way With Dulé Hill” on PBS.