Bio
Mukaddas Mijit is an ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, and artist. She was born in Urumchi, the capital city of the Uyghur Homeland. Upon arriving in Paris in 2003 to study classical music, she realized how little the outside world knew of Uyghur culture. She then began her studies as an ethnomusicologist, researching the staging of Uyghur dance and music, receiving her PhD in 2015. As a dancer, Mijit has performed internationally and collaborated with numerous performers, creating original works that infuse traditional Uyghur music and dance with other cultures and styles. As a filmmaker, she has produced several ethnographic documentary films, including "Qetiq, Rock'n Ürümchi" (nominated in the 10th Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival in 2014) and 30 Boys: Uyghur Meshrep Project. Most recently, she wrote and co-directed the medium-length film "Nikah," about the challenges Uyghur women face from both traditional social mores and the highly oppressive political environment in China. She has also produced a series of video works on the trauma endured by Uyghurs in recent years, Hear Uyghur Voices. Mijit is co-creator, co-director, and performer in Everybody Is Gone, an original interactive theatrical production raising awareness about the ongoing crisis in the Uyghur Homeland, and co-creator and co-host of "WEghur Stories," a podcast on the global Uyghur diaspora. She co-edited an anthology of Uyghur contemporary and oral literature in French, published by Jentayu. Her most recent collaborative work, Geopoetics, brings together artists and researchers around questions of territory, memory, and displacement. Mijit is currently developing several collaborative sound and archive performance works, alongside her next fiction films.