Mukaddas Mijit

Dancer, Academic, Curator, Activist

Mukaddas Mijit was born in May 1982 in Urumchi, the capital city of the Uyghur homeland. She is an ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, dancer, and music manager.

In 2003, Mukaddas Mijit came to Paris to study classical music. The invisibility of Uyghur culture made her decide to study ethnomusicology to enable her to promote her own culture. In 2015, she obtained her PhD degree in ethnomusicology, researching about “Staging of Uyghur Music and Dance”.

As a dancer Dr. Mijit has performed internationally, including Maison des cultures du Monde, Théâtre des Abbesses, Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), the Morgenland Festival (Osnabrück), Ateliers d’ethnomusicologie (Geneva), Watermill Centre NY, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Festival de Fes Morocco, Singapore Festival of Arts, and Grand Performance Los Angeles, Sacred music festival Johudpur India. She has collaborated with numerous performers (such as Ayshemgul Memet, Sanuber Tursun, Perhat Khaliq and Sandrine Monlezun) creating tradition-based works of song and dance infusing culture and style. In addition, Dr. Mijit has organized a great number of cultural programs, coordinating contemporary and traditional Uyghur dance and music programs, while managing the logistics involved in Uyghur artists traveling from the Uyghur homeland. Mijit is multilingual, fluent in Uyghur, Chinese, French, English, and she can communicate in Turkish, Uzbek, Kazakh and Kirgiz languages.

As a filmmaker, she made several ethnographic documentaries about Uyghur music and dance. “Qetiq, Rock'n Ürümchi” is Dr. Mijit’s first feature length documentary (55’, 2013). It received a nomination in 10th Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival in 2014. She also made several short films featuring Uyghur muqam traditions, Uyghur life, and some experimental video work such as “6 meters of Atles” (Brooklyn bridge dance). Recently she was involved in a documentary film “Ok-Oc” (2018) screened in Festival PMC, Toulouse and another film about traditional musical instrument-making in Occitania, currently in post production. As an artist, she is involved in several dance and music projects in France and America. Collaborating with American artist Lisa Ross, she created several performative works for art exhibitions. She regularly gives dance workshops to promote the gracious Central Asian dance that is Uyghur.