photography * mixed media * songwriting
Marilyn McNeal is a San Francisco-based artist and digital media instructor who uses photography, sound / web design and mixed media to explore everyday experience and develop experimental ways of storytelling. Her works reflect her interest in community and consciousness, culture and ethnic pride, and placemaking though audio and visual documentary.
In the last five years, McNeal has traveled to Mexico, Cuba and Morocco to photograph and record the lives of community activists, healers, farmers and musicians.
In 2006, McNeal completed a photo documentary of a Zapatista village in the state of Chiapas, Mexico while working as a human rights observer. The photographs of children, families and the jungle forest they live in powerfully capture the dignity of the indigenous people and the ancestral lands they are struggling to protect.
In January 2008, McNeal traveled to Cuba and photographed three prominent organic farming projects around the city of Havana. Outside of the city, McNeal traveled to the Pinar del Rio province and photographed the people, places and spaces involved in several prominent local environmental and tourism projects. Local photo projects have focused on San Francisco counter culture and include images from St. Stupid's Day and Easter in Dolores Park.
As a sound designer and audio documentarian, McNeal has done field recording in Fes, Chiapas, New York City and San Francisco. Soundscapes are based on a fusion of street sounds, ambient conversation, and layers of percussion. Audio documentaries have featured "Picture the Homeless" a street level homeless advocacy group, members of New York's Haitian community organizing protests against the NYPD, local groups working to save community gardens, and a Lower East Side community center fighting developers over use of an abandoned school.
Currently, Marilyn is a working on Imaginopedia, a multimedia wiki that seeks to reinterpret narrative, information and community while offering visitors the opportunity to co-author original "stories." Recent entries have included ASCII code, email subject header spam text, pencil sketches, digitally manipulated photos, shapes made from 3D modeling software, embedded video, stop motion animation and audio clips. A resident member of the Million Fishes artist collective, McNeal has exhibited her photographs, sound design and mixed media work in the collective's bi-annual group shows since 2005.
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million
fishes arts collective 
