Mei Ann Teo

Mei Ann Teo (they/them) is a queer immigrant from Singapore who is an artistic leader, theatre maker, and educator. Teo makes theatre & film at the intersection of artistic/civic/contemplative practice. As a director/devisor/dramaturg, they create across genres, including music theatre, intermedial participatory work, reimagining classics, and documentary theatre. They developed and directed world premieres of Jillian Walker’s SKiNFoLK: An American Show at the Bushwick Starr, Ruth Tang’s Building A Character with Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai at Wild Rice’s Singapore Theatre Festival, Madeline Sayet’s Where We Belong at Shakespeare’s Globe, Woolly Mammoth, and national tour including The Public, Seattle Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, Philadelphia Theatre Company, the Goodman, Portland Center Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Folger Shakespeare Library and the North American premiere of Amy Berryman’s Walden at Theatreworks Hartford that swept the Connecticut Circle Critics Awards including Best Production and Director. Teo’s work has toured the U.S. and internationally, including the world premiere of Dim Sum Warriors at Theatre Above in Shanghai by Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo, composed by Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun, which went on a national twenty-five city tour in China. Teo developed and directed Bryonn Bain’s Lyrics from Lockdown, which has toured Belgium’s Festival de Liege, Singapore’s M1 Festival, National Black Theatre, and many prisons and educational institutions nationwide. They created Labyrinth for the Beijing International Festival (Top 8 in Beijing News). A recipient of the League of Professional Theatre Women’s Josephine Abady Award and the Inaugural Lily Fan Director Lilly Award, they have served as the Artistic Director of Musical Theatre Factory, the Associate Artistic Director and Director of New Work at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and currently as an Artistic Leader at Ping Chong and Company.

"I first connected with Ping when I was a graduate student in Columbia’s MFA program. Anne Bogart was guiding us through finding the right mentor for our materials semester - which asked us to work on material that would take us into our future as directors. I had been working in documentary theatre for over ten years by that time - the form had taught me why theatre mattered. That project was based on the exiled Chinese poet Liao Yiwu’s 19 Days, a work published in the Paris Review, detailing every June 4th from 1989 onwards for nineteen years. A thoughtful and clear mentor from the start, Ping becamea north star for me - an artist who fearlessly reinvented himself in surprising, irreverent, and profound ways, and whose work always made connections that were entirely unique in humorous, beautiful and thought-provoking ways."