Speaking Event: LUMA Chicago on Muslim-American Art

The Muslim Protagonist 2017. To be Muslim in America is to either be invisibilized, or Otherized. To be Muslim in America is to be pushed into the margins, racialized, and Orientalized. How then can we, as Muslims, choose to write ourselves onto the pages of modern memory? Join us as Hussein Rashid, Bushra Rehman, Shannon Chakraborty, and Melody Moezzi delve into the challenges that come with centering the margin and the Muslim protagonist.

I’ll be participating in a talkback after this performance. The Sarah Play – 14th Street Y. Three actors struggle with how to tell the ancient, sacred story of Sarah and Hagar, the mothers of Isaac and Ishmael, through a modern lens. Drawing from the Muslim, Christian and Jewish traditions, and trying various iterations to determine which religion’s version of the narrative gets told, the actors wrestle with how to tell a tale when there are multiple accounts of what happened.