'Jubilee for a New Vision' by Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko '09 Presented at Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater

By
Emma Schillage
February 16, 2022

Jubilee for a New Vision by Playwriting alumnus Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko's ’09 will play at The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space on February 21 at 7 pm. The play will also feature works by Ayla Xuan Chi Sullivan. The piece is a part of Carnegie Hall's 2022 Afrofuturism Festival and is presented by National Queer Theatre in partnership with The Dramatists Guild.

The evening will showcase excerpts from new work by Mwaluko and Sullivan, who are both inaugural New Visions Fellows. New Visions Fellowship Lead Mentor Roger Q. Mason directs and hosts the play. 

"Through their art, they envision Black Futures which transform systemic invisibility into fonts of joy, community, and infinite imagination," said Mason in a statement. "The Black trans and gender non-conforming playwrights making work in America are at the forefront of Afrofuturism. They've had to make a way out of no way and still hold their heads high while striving."

The New Visions Fellowship is a year-long professional development program that celebrates and uplifts Black trans and gender non-conforming writers. Mason and Program Manager Jordan Stovall lead the program.

Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko is a third-culture queer, non-binary trans-Tanzanian-American. Nick’s plays include: Silence Is A Sound; the comedy Cock Tales for Christmas37, a Black lesbian duet set in prison; S.T.A.RMarsha P. Johnson; queer trilogy bathed in queer African fantasia Waafrika 123; QTPOC trans masculine They/Them/Theirs; the queer apocalyptic Homeless in the AfterLifeBlueprint for an African LesbianSH/EroAsymmetrical We; Brotherly Love; Trailer Park Tundra; Once A Man Always A Man; Mama Afrika; Queering MacBeth; Life Is About the Kill; That Day God Visits You; Ata; To Dyke Trans; Gayze; Good Grief; Pence At The Border and many more. 

Mwaluko was nationally recognized and nominated for Resident Playwright Initiative with Playwrights’ Foundation (San Francisco, CA 2019-2023); Resilience and Development (R&D) Writers’ Lab with Crowded Fire Theater Company in San Francisco (2017-2018); New York City’s EWG (Emerging Writers’ Group) at the Public Theater sponsored by Time Warner Co.; New York City’s Groundbreakers Group, Djerassi Artist Residency in northern California, Freedom Train Productions, Ragged Wing Ensemble and more. Nick is a 2018 finalist for Africa’s Gerald Kraak Award; a two-time recipient of the Creativity Fund issued by the Public Theater and Time Warner, and a 2017 Spring grantee of a Theatre Bay Area (TBA) Individual Artist Cash grant. Nick graduated Magna Cum Laude at Columbia University in New York City as an undergraduate and completed an MFA at Columbia as a Point Scholar, the nation’s largest LGBTQIA scholarship fund. Nick attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop thanks to a Norman Felton Fellowship.