ABOUT US
Theatre as medicine
The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women is produced by Rhodessa Jones Productions. The Medea Project develops original productions that demonstrate our vision of "Arts as Social Activism".
Our mission is to help women reinvision their lives through the creative process using art as a vehicle for both self-healing and social change. The Medea Project focuses on women who have been justice impacted, experienced significant trauma, and are living with stigmatized health and social conditions. Our goal is to reduce recidivism and increase social engagement and connectedness.
WE ARE
Women in recovery, formerly incarcerated women, women living / thriving with HIV
We are women dedicated to personal healing and beyond, loud and proud, queer, BIPOC, caucasian of all ages
We are spiritual women, writers, poets, dancers, singers, actors, scholars, mothers, grandmothers, aunts
We are survivors
We are women willing to tell the truth about our most shadowy places
We meet women where they're at, we recognize that we don't know what it took someone to arrive in the moment.
We are weavers, and circle keepers, on our own journeys of facing the music
We don't "get" anyone to tell their story; we tell ours
Our Founder
Rhodessa Jones is nationally and internationally recognized as a pioneer and leader in utilizing art as a vehicle for social change. Rhodessa's storytelling mastery is central, fundamental and inspirational to the Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women / HIV Circle, which she founded 38 years ago. Generations of young women have been taught and experienced epiphanies under her tutelage. Some have gone on to become theatre professionals in their own right. More importantly, many more have been saved. All benefited from their exposure to Ms. Jones’s sage counsel and worldly wisdom.
Born the eighth of a dozen children to migrant worker parents, her most recent accomplishments include the San Francisco Arts Commission's Legacy Artist grant, awarded in 2024, a Legacy Artist Award in 2023-24 from Youth Speaks through the California Arts Council and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2022. She is a Frank H.T. Rhodes Chair at Cornell University, conducted visiting professorships at Dartmouth University, Hamilton College, and the University of Wisconsin. She was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts, awarded San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Foundation's Community Leadership Award, and an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater. Her solo plays: “The Legend of Lily Overstreet”; “Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women”; and “Hot Flashes, Power Surges & Private Summers” spanned decades and stand out as seminal tour de force performances in the canon of American theatre.
Theatre as medicine
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Theatre as medicine 〰️
FE BONGOLAN
Fe
Actress, writer and dramaturg Fe Bongolan has been with The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women since 1991. Her classes in writing and performing for theatre focuses on finding the personal voice, listening actively with the heart, and developing modern personal mythologies for autobiographical work on stage. Fe’s performance and play development work began with The Medea Project’s second mainstage production “Food Taboos in the Land of the Dead” (1992-93), and for forty years she has continued to write, act and help other women tell their story. Fe studied and performed under dance theater producer and director Deborah Slater, performed as an actor with the Asian American Theater Company, Teatro Ng Tanan, and Campo Santo, and studied rhythmic movement and performance with American percussionist and educator Keith Terry.
Lisa A Frias
lisa
Lisa A Frias is a multifaceted performer, choreographer, and writer. Her training with Rhodessa Jones began in 1995, with her first role in a Medea Project production, Diana the Huntress in Buried Fire. For over two decades she’s been making art in the crucible of Medea, honoring the strength and suppleness of women who courageously transform wounds into healing. Her skill is in creating movement constellations - dance actions woven with words, rhythm, and song, honing the naturally interdisciplinary nature of personal stories of struggle and redemption. She loves choreographing with stools and chairs especially. Lisa is moved by following the seed of an idea, a phrase, a truth, and coaxing it into a collective artistic expression. In her work with Medea she has experienced her own deeply vulnerable and powerful transformations. Her solo works include Gratitude, which was part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, and directed by Rhodessa Jones, and her current work in progress, Project Room 31, which is about her career as a teacher; she’s taught dance to public middle school students for close to 25 years. Lisa trained with the late Mestre Carlos Aceituno and performed in Fogo Na Roupa for 12 years, and was the co-director of As Pernas Com Alma Dance Company with Tammy Ryan. She produced and directed Just Mama, a show about single motherhood, as the thesis for her Masters in Creative Arts Education from SFSU. Lisa also earned an MFA in Creative Inquiry from CIIS, and has trained in Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. She is a Lucumi priest and proud mother of Django.
Felicia Scaggs
Feefee
Felicia (Feefee) Scaggs began her performance career with the Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women in 1989 – the year it began. Since Medea’s first production Reality is Just Outside the Window (1991), Feefee continues as a powerful role model of a woman who has saved her own life – and the lives of others, by telling her own story. By teaching others to do the same, she brings that skill directly to women in recovery through the Medea Project’s workshops. She tours regularly with the company to demonstrate the art of autobiographical storytelling to campuses, community programs and organizations.
Angela wilson
Angela
Angela Wilson is living proof that theater saves lives, utilizing the Medea methodology she has transformed her history of violent trauma, addiction, and incarceration into triumphant testimony on stage and teaching in academia. Helping women save their own lives through the theatrical process is her passion and life blood. Angela is an actress, writer, teacher, producer, and director. Angela's first performance with the Medea Project was Slouching Towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/Observation on Race in 1998 while incarcerated at the SF County Jail. Hand-cuffed and shackled every evening for a two-week run at the Lorraine Hansbury Theater transformed her life and she has never looked back. Her exemplary work with the Medea Project was recognized with a scholarship to the American Conservatory Theater, where she studied for two years. In 2025 she obtained her BA in Theater Arts as a member of the Scholar’s program at San Francisco State University. Angela has been a guest artist/lecturer/performer with Rhodessa Jones at UC Berkeley, Rutgers University, San Francisco State University, UW Madison, UC San Francisco, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Hamilton. She performed in Eve Ensler’s, VD: Until the Violence Stops at Lincoln Center directed by Rhodessa Jones. She’s held lead roles with The Medea Project, including, Can We Get There by Candlelight? (2001), My Life in the Concrete Jungle (2006), Dancing with the Clown of Love (2010). Other performances with The Medea Project include community concerts series by Cultural Odyssey’s Healing Force Community Orchestra (2013), the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem North Carolina (2005) and at the National Conference on HIV/HepC conference entitled, Performance as Medicine, Washington DC (2012). Angela has written, directed and produced, anger is sorrow’s bodyguard (2023) and Look What Love Did (2026) with incarcerated women utilizing the Medea methodology. Her greatest joy is being a Glama to her grandson Jhosea Noah.