Photo from Mikaal Sulaiman’s performance at Voxfest in Lebanon, 2018. Photo: Robert C Strong II
Photo from Mikaal Sulaiman’s performance at Voxfest in Lebanon, 2018. Photo: Robert C Strong II
Project Black Plague by Mikaal Sulaiman.
Project Black Plague by Mikaal Sulaiman.
Project Black Plague
Mikaal Sulaiman is a writer, director, sound designer, and composer who works across film, TV, and theater.
Artist BioProject Black Plague is a sound performance, experienced as a clandestine presentation created for headphones about race and death, moving beyond lament to intellectually confound a radical new understanding of being Black in America. Part revival tent, part Afro-futurist reeducation seminar, the work draws parallels between American racism and the Black Death of the Middle Ages in Europe. Over the course of the performance, the audience receives clandestine information on headphones from a secret organization unlocking the code of American racism: how it has spread like a pandemic for centuries, how it replicates and mutates, how it partners with institutional power and with death. At its core, Project Black Plague asks the audience to confront this pandemic of Black death in America, and to plumb its meaning, both scientifically and spiritually.
Mikaal Sulaiman
New Haven, CT
Mikaal Sulaiman, originally from Rochester, NY, is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across film, TV, and theater. Sulaiman is a writer, director, sound designer, and composer. As a writer, he is part of a writer’s room on a new episodic show for A24/Amazon. He most recently collaborated with his older brother, Amir Sulaiman, on a short film called Laying Flowers.:.Setting Fires for which he was the Creative Director and Editor. As theater deviser he has received artist residencies at Space on Ryder Farm in Upstate New York, UCross Foundation in Wyoming, as well as VoxFest at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. As a sound designer he has worked on award winning world premiere productions that include: Thoughts of a Colored Man (Broadway), Rags Parkland (Ars Nova), Fairview (Soho Rep) Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama, and Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova), among others. He has received nominations from Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award, Bay Area Theatre Critics, and Audelco Award. Recently he received the 2021 CTG Sherwood Award and the 2019 Henry Hewes Design Award for excellence in Sound Design. Sulaiman is currently a professor at The Yale School of Drama as Head of the Sound Design Concentration. He attended the University of the Arts receiving a BFA and later studied the Jacques Lecoq approach to avant-garde theater at the London International School of Performing Arts. Black Enso, is a podcast that Sulaiman hosts and can be found on most podcast platforms. Moors Noor Media is Sulaiman’s production company.
Photo: Amir Sulaiman