Black Women MADE Project: Futurewomen

Directors: Meida McNeal and Sydney Charles

Seed Phase: 2014-2015 & 2018-2022

Gardners: Honey Pot Peformance, Illinois Humanities, Field Foundation

Honey Pot Performance (HPP) is a Black feminist performance collective with a twenty-year history of exhibition and community-based engagement. HPP’s method involves working with community members to develop multidisciplinary performance works.

MADE Lab Director AJ Christian started working with HPP in 2014, documenting the development of Ma(s)king Her, an Afrofuturist dance theater work collectively authored by HPP and a community of primarily Black woman-identified artists. The three-episode docu-series Futurewomen chronicles the development and first performance of the show. Dr. Christian joined HPP’s board in 2018, advising and raising thousands of dollars for the organization. He concluded his tenure in 2022 with the production of Futurewomen 2: Black Feminist Futures, a virtual filmed reading of Ma(s)king Her, directed by Sydney Charles, designed to attract prospective board members, artists and funders as HPP entered a capacity-building phase and expanded their mission to include digital humanities projects, among other initiatives.

HPP and Futurewomen experiments with digital production and distribution to explore futures for Black femmes thriving against the legacy misogynoir and matrix of domination.