Meida Teresa McNeal

Meida Teresa McNeal received her M.F.A. in Choreography from Ohio State University ('00) and her PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University ('07). From 2007-2009, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Dept of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and at the Cogut Humanities Center at Brown University. She recently relocated to Chicago, her native city, and is working on new choreographic and performance ethnography projects in addition to writing a scholarly book on race, class and cultural politics in Trinidadian dance across the 20th and 21st centuries. She is also working as the Dance Researcher at the Chicago Artist’s Resource web project. 

Meida's research combines the fields of critical/performance ethnography and choreography to interrogate black and brown cultural nationalisms across the Americas. Her current scope of work crosses three overlapping axes: mapping local/global formations and circulations of cultural performance; developing collaborative scholarship models and content; and integrating new media, writing and performance. Across these threads, she seeks to enrich possibilities for conceiving performance as a way of knowing and to broaden the continuum of formats through which we develop, disseminate and digest scholarship.