The son of a Baptist inner city minister, Benjamin Meade grew up in Kansas City under extreme adversity, both financially and culturally. A brain injury at the age of 11 left him unable to speak for nearly two years, forcing him to relearn language skills through cognitive trial and error. He put himself through college by playing in a rock band while pursuing a degree in filmmaking at Central Missouri State University.

After graduating in 1977, he was offered an entry level job at Universal in Los Angeles but refused to leave the mid-west hoping for a film community to develop. Discouraged from lack of employment opportunities in the film industry where he lived, he took a job as a financial services consultant with New England Financial and remained there full time for over 20 years. The suicide of his younger brother in 1994 forced him to pause and look at his life. He applied to the university once again and earned a masters degree in American History, then a Ph.D. in Film and Theatre from the University of Kansas in 1999.

He worked closely with Stan Brakhage who worked with him in the development of many short experimental films, and one feature film. While presenting a research paper in Denmark in 1999, he met Lasso Tar of Pecks, Hungary, who invited him to teach there the following year. While teaching, he met Hungarian Filmmaker Andres Sunray and made the controversial but touching film Vakvagany (2002)-which featured Brakhage-in 2001. He completed Das Bus in 2003, and collaborated with crime novelist James Ellroy on Bazaar Bizarre in 2004. Following the death of Brakhage, he finished the film BRAKHAGE: THE FINAL WORD which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. His latest film is American Stag (2006), and he is in production of the film AMERICAN MUSIC: OFF THE RECORD AND ON THE ROAD featuring Noam Chomsky, Douglas Rushkoff, and more than 50 musicians in an interrogation of the music industry.

He refers to his work as "experimental documentary", a usually controversial presentation of non-fiction material. His films have screened in more than 30 countries worldwide, an have acquired distribution throught the Sundance Channel, multiple international DVD labels and television networks.

Meade is also founder of Casas Por Cristo, a missions organization that builds nearly 300 homes per year for the poor in Juarez, Mexico. He resides in Lenexa, Kansas (outside of Kansas City) and is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at Avila University in Kansas City. He is editor of the Journal of Moving Image Studies and a FELLOW of the Center for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is also co-founder of the Kansas International Film Festival, and board member of Pilgrim Chapel in Kansas City