Meida Teresa McNeal

Artistic and Managing Director,

Honey Pot Performance

Over the past decade, Meida Teresa McNeal has been artistic and managing director of Honey Pot Performance, a Black feminist performance collective turned nonprofit, while also advocating for more equitable cultural resources and brokered cultural partnerships for Chicago’s parks as arts and culture manager with the Chicago Park District. Honey Pot Performance, a women-focused collaborative, has created work and told stories about their communities and lives. With Honey Pot Performance, she has cultivated an approach to performance integrating movement, theater, and first-voice to examine the nuanced ways people negotiate identity, belonging, and difference in their lives and cultural memberships. She creates multiform theater projects, participatory public humanities programming; and Honey Pot acts as an incubator for the development of new works by artists of color aligned with its commitment to performance, storytelling, and the Black experience. Under her stewardship, Honey Pot Performance grew its budget from $50,000 to over $200,000 allowing it to grow its operational staffing structure with folks stepping into new administrative roles. Meida drove and helped launch the Chicago Black Social Culture Map, documenting Black social life through live programs, a digital map, and archiving events. A multi-organizational collaboration, Chicago Black Social Culture Map researched Chicago’s Black social culture across the 20th century from the First Great Migration through the birth of House music. Since then, through open sessions, targeted interviews, and multi-faceted research, data has been compiled on over 350 venues in the Chicagoland area.

As an artist, educator, researcher, administrator, collaborator, producer, and facilitator, Meida actively convenes artists and communities as potential change agents and as strategic solution makers to urgent social issues through the field of cultural production. Her practice of leadership is rooted in listening, guiding, and facilitating as she helps surface and documents historical narratives. At the backbone of her work are core values of imagination, self-actualization, consensus-building, and collective action.