M. Asli Dukan

M. Asli will take workshops at NextFab in Philadelphia, starting June 2019 to support skill-building elements for a recently awarded grant from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation for her upcoming visual arts project, “The Healing Box”. This interactive, multimedia project requires that she learn and use 3D scanning and printing, electronics, and design software to complete it by Spring 2020.  M. Asli centers the stories of traditionally marginalized populations in the science fiction genres, especially women, and Black, queer, working-class and immigrant populations; this project connects to her social change practice because it subverts the idea of “The Pain Box” from the science fiction text, Dune by Frank Herbert. Instead she will create “The Healing Box”, an interactive, multimedia box-shaped device that uses a soundscape to relay the sickness and healing stories of five generations of women in her family along with a motion-activated, colored and pulsing lighting system to provoke a contemplative visual experience. Both of these elements will be designed to engage with the mental awareness of the visitors who interact with the work by becoming a space for reflection on healing and human connection.

M. Asli will create an interactive website for Invisible Universe, a documentary about Black speculative fiction (SF). The website will archive the vast collection of information about SF that M. Asli has gathered over the years and will give visitors a chance to use this information to speculate on their own future. Visitors will learn about the various writers, films, filmmakers, eras, and movements of Black SF through video, sound, graphics, and text. The website will also include what Asli calls a “future incubator,” where visitors can speculate about possible futures for our world by answering a set of questions. She hopes that people, especially young people, will use this opportunity to actively analyze issues in their lives and speculate about the futures they want, or don’t want, to see.

M. Asli Dukan is an independent filmmaker who embraces the futuristic, fantastic and imaginary genres of speculative fiction (SF) as a way to explore the possibilities of social transformation in society. She has written, produced and directed several short SF films that have screened at distinct festivals across the country including the ImageNation Film and Music Festival in New York City and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle. She has been the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Urban Artists Initiative Grant (2009), the Kitchen Table Giving Circle Grant (2012), and from the Leeway Foundation – the Art and Change Grant (2014, 2016) and the Transformation Award (2016). In 2016, she also had the honor of being named an NBPC360 Fellow with the National Black Programming Consortium in New York. She holds an MFA in Media and Communication Arts from the City College of New York and is the founder of Mizan Media Productions where she has produced her own films, as well as numerous promotional projects for innovative, progressive and radical artists and organizations. Some work produced by her company include her films Orishas (2001), 73 (2008) and M.O.M.M. (2011) and her music videos Boot (2006) for Tamar-kali and Do You Mind (2008) for Hanifah Walidah. She is currently in post-production on two feature length projects, Invisible Universe, a documentary about the historical representations and the participation of Black people in the genres of speculative fiction and Songs for Nina, a music and travel documentary following the “Daughters of Nina” orchestra on their French tour as they pay homage to the late singer/pianist, Nina Simone. Her next projects are the SF web series, Resistance and the anthology horror film, Skin Folk, based on the book by the award winning SF writer, Nalo Hopkinson. Ms. Dukan also tours the country as one of the leading voices lecturing about Black Speculative Fiction history.

M. Asli will create a poster-sized infographic revolving around the history of African Americans in speculative fiction books and movies. Through images and text, the poster will not only supply the reader with an introduction to this canon of work, but also highlight and connect it to a larger framework that is contemporary and relates to African American youth. The poster will be introduced as an educational tool within select Philadelphia high schools during the 2014-2015 year, with accompanying presentations and workshops aiming to encourage students’ engagement in story and world building techniques that can potentially enrich and transform their lives.