Music
For the past two years, Marilyn has been studying american roots music, specifically blues music through the piano. She is currently studying in Richmond, California with Aaron Blumenfeld, a noted blues and boogie woogie music scholar.
Photography
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 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 eco-tourism projects.
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 eco-tourism projects.
Audio Documetary
 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.
Open Source Projects
In 2007, Marilyn created 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.
History of Professional Work & Education
In 2000, McNeal began her teaching career in New York and instructed at The New School University, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Long Island University and the Technology & Learning Center at The Armory. After returning the San Francisco, McNeal taught at Positive Resource Center and LYRIC and was a volunteer computer instructor at the San Francisco Public Library.
Marilyn has taught web production as Adjunct Faculty at the City College of San Francisco since the Fall of 2004 and received her Master's degree in Media Studies from The New School for Social Research in 2001. Her online course space can be visited at www.webinstructor.org/
Awards, Publications, Lectures, Exhibits
 In 2006, McNeal was interviewed for "Crossover: How Artists Build Careers across Commercial, Nonprofit and Community Work." by Ann Markusen, Professor of Planning & Public Policy at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. A year later, in May 2007, McNeal was invited to speak at the Alternative Lecture Series at the San Francisco Art Institute - Graduate Center. Her presentation, Social Media & the Alternative Narrative, focused on the role artists can and do play in the reconstruction of reality online.
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