Bio
Asif Majid is a scholar-artist-educator working at the intersection of racialized sociopolitical identities, multimedia, marginality, and new performance, particularly through devising community-based participatory theatre, making improvisational music, and addressing the nexus of Islam and performance. He has published in a range of academic and popular media outlets, and his performance credits include work with the Kennedy Center in the US and the Royal Exchange Theatre in the UK, among others. Asif was a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with the San Francisco Arts Commission and a Lab Fellow with The Laboratory for Global Performance and Performance. He earned his PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance from The University of Manchester. Currently, Asif is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, where he is at work on a book project titled Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Britain. Asif can be found online at www.asifmajid.com.
Arab American National Museum
Majid works with the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich. Majid studies how the museum has grown and evolved since it was founded in 2005 to highlight Arab-American contributions to the U.S. He focuses in particular on perceptions of the institution among Arab-American communities, both in Dearborn and throughout the country, and how the museum could best use its ties to such communities to serve as a voice for Arab-Americans and to foster conversations among them.