Asif Majid writes fiction, (academic) non-fiction, and plays. Using community-based participatory theatre, he works at the intersection of Islam and performance as a theatre maker, educator, researcher, and consultant whose work scripts, stages, and traces local and global nodes of history, power, performance, race, and (de)coloniality. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, where he is also Affiliate Faculty in Anthropology; Asian and Asian American Studies; Intersectional Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics; Middle East Studies; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Asif maintains an active consulting practice on issues of racial justice, power sharing, arts administration, and organizational capacity and structure, all through an applied theatre and social justice lens.
Asif has received over $500,000 in grant and fellowship funding. He has been an Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow at the Arab American National Museum, funded by the Social Science Research Council and The Wallace Foundation; a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with the San Francisco Arts Commission; and an inaugural Lab Fellow with The Lab. Further research and creative project support has come from the Fulbright Program, the Asian Cultural Council, the Open Society Foundation, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. His performance credits include work with Theatre Prometheus (US), The Stoop (US), the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (US), Convergence Theatre (US), Royal Exchange Theatre (UK), Unity Theatre (UK), and Action Transport Theatre (UK). His artistic practice tackles issues of social justice that affect communities, creating spaces within which communities can respond to sociopolitical narratives about them. Recent theatre and devising credits have focused on: asylum seekers’ imagined futures, transnational refugee movement, model minorities in the United States, anti-Muslim hatred, the historical legacy of Partition, and the relationship between sexual harassment and power in Morocco.
As an educator, Asif has reached thousands of young people in the United States and abroad through summer programs, Model UN activities, and teaching. He has served as a facilitator for Arena Stage, Seeds of Peace, and Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. His Model UN experience has included designing and running improvisational theatre-based crisis simulations, highlighting global political issues such as the Haitian coup d’état in 1992, Partition in 1947, and conflict in Turkey in 1905 between secularists, Armenians, and the Sultanate. He has taught undergraduate, high school, and middle school students across multiple settings, using online and theatrical simulations to develop their understanding of historical practices of empire, state formation and national identity, and challenges faced by conflict and environmental refugees.
In 2019, Asif completed his practice-based PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance at The University of Manchester, for which he devised theatre with British Muslim youth. In 2015, he earned an MA with distinction in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University, during which time he served as Research Fellow for The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics (The Lab). Prior to that, in 2013, he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and valedictorian from UMBC after completing a self-designed BA with honors in Interdisciplinary Studies (Global Peace Building and Conflict Management). While at UMBC, he was a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar and became a David L. Boren National Security Scholar to Morocco.
His forthcoming book, Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester, is due out with Routledge in 2025.
© 2024 by Asif Majid