Meade Palidofsky, an award-winning playwright, lyricist, and director, is the founding Artistic Director of Storycatchers Theatre in Chicago (formerly known as Music Theatre Workshop). She retired in 2021 after 37 years spent creating and performing works with Chicago community youth and with detained and incarcerated youth with the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice (IDJJ) and the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Cent (JTDC). She guided the youth through more than 100 productions of groundbreaking musical theater at the Field Museum, the Chicago Park District, the University of Chicago, and her signature program in the Juvenile Justice system.
In 2010, Ms. Palidofsky spent a year with Dr. Bradley Stolbach, a trauma psychologist, as a result of being awarded a Chicago Community Trust Experienced Leader Fellowship. Over that year, she and Dr. Stolbach compared Ms. Palidofsky’s storywriting method to the tenets of Complex Trauma Therapy. This resulted in an article in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Trauma, a presentation at the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies in Montreal, and a story and playwriting handbook, The Transformative Power of Story and Song. The handbook demonstrates a safe and healing storywriting method for training artists to support youth in healing from their experience of trauma. As part of the Community Trust Fellowship, Meade also worked with the Citizens Theater Community Arts program in Glasgow, Scotland, and with Music in Prison at the York Women’s Prison in England.
Ms. Palidofsky’s work with girls in prison is the subject of an Emmy award-winning documentary, Girls on the Wall (2010) directed and produced by Heather Ross, a California documentarian. Ms. Ross was inspired by an Ira Glass This American Life radio recording of the first Fabulous Females production at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. Heather filmed a 6-months-long residency at the Illinois Youth Center in Warrenville with access to the creation of a new musical along with interviews of the girls and their families. In addition to the Emmy, Girls on the Wall was the winner of the Bermuda Film Festival and won a Silver Award at the Chicago International Film Festival.
Since retiring from Storycatchers in 2021, Ms. Palidofsky has worked with a group of 1990s Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center alumni called Remember Our Names. Together, they are writing a feature film script, Where The Bad Kids Go, based on their lives and experiences of nearly four years of detention waiting for trial before coming together to create and perform the musical Dreaming Among Friends with 40 other youth at the Detention Center in 1995. 30 years later, as productive members of the Community and mentors to youth, Remember Our Names has presented workshops with Criminal Justice and Theater students at the College of DuPage and was featured in the Race and Lawyering series at the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University.
Since 2010, Meade has been a member of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center Advisory Board where she is currently the Chair. Prior to the pandemic, she created workshops for the Chicago Police Department where CPD recruits performed in and analyzed behavioral choices posed by Chicago youth-written scripts about their challenging interactions with police.
Meade is a recipient of the Bright Promises Visionary Award (2021), the Schweitzer Leadership Award (2016), Aspen Ideas Festival and Lincoln Center presenter with Angelica Garcia (2014), the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award (2013), the Theater in Social Change Award (2011), Columbia College-Scotland Arts Exchange Artist (2009), the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-90), the Illinois Arts Council (1988-90), the Mercedes Mentor Award (1988) the American Musical Theatre Festival Grand Prize (1986), and the John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Foundation Award (1985), among others.
Meade received one of the very first Meier Awards (2006) and is eternally grateful for the experience of working with the amazing Helen Merrier (Meier) who portrayed the indomitable Grandma in Dreams of Defiance in showcases in New York and Defiance, Ohio, culminating in a production at the Theater Building in Chicago.