Malik Gillani
Co-executive Artistic Director, Silk Road Rising
Malik Gillani counters negative images and stereotypes of Middle Eastern and Muslim peoples with representation grounded in authentic, multi-faceted, human experiences.
Founded in 2002 along with his husband and work partner Jamil Khoury, Silk Road Rising is a community-centered theater, artmaking and arts service organization rooted in Asian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim experiences that began as an intentional and creative response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Malik has worked tirelessly to build an inclusive arts ecology in Chicago, providing theater artists and professionals from Silk Road backgrounds with opportunities for career growth. Every year, hundreds of Chicago actors, directors, designers, and other theater professionals work with Silk Road Rising and 70 percent are from ALAANA communities. Prior to the pandemic, he conceived of and developed Silk Road Rising’s model for creating online video plays which are now being accessed across the globe. These video plays now form a foundation of Silk Road Rising’s media projects, and the experience with developing video plays was instrumental in easing the transition to virtual programming during the pandemic. In September of 2019, Malik suffered a severe heart attack and stroke that initially left him unable to use the right side of his body or to speak. As an artist and arts leader living with stroke-induced aphasia and apraxia of speech, he continues to use the arts as a means for sparking conversations through the power of storytelling.
Malik is uniquely positioned as a Muslim, Queer, Person of Color, and as an immigrant in a position of leadership. His presence in the performing arts sector is vital to a field that struggles to decenter whiteness within storytelling and performance. Through Silk Road Rising, Malik has long challenged the misperceptions and inequities reinforced in traditional theater practices and institutional theater models. He weaves management, negotiating, fundraising, community organizing, and alliance-building into keeping the organization a stable and growing entity.
