Malik Work ’98

Malik Work, the NYC based actor-director-griot-playwright is a founding member of the groundbreaking jazz/hip hop conglomerate: The Real Live Show. He has written and starred in a one-person Hip Hop Theater piece entitled Verses At Work, for which he was nominated alongside Anna Deavere Smith and Sarah Jones for Best Solo Performance at the AUDELCO Awards. The remix version of the show was featured on tour with the Public Theater’s Mobile Unit. He also wrote, starred in, and executive produced a film version of Verses @ Work that was notably selected by the Hip Hop Film Festival, and won the International Spotlight Award at the Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival. As a playwright, Malik was commissioned by the Folger Shakespeare Theater to co-write Our Verse In Time to Come, a play at the intersection of Hip Hop, Shakespeare, social justice and mass incarceration. The play toured Washington DC public libraries, and ran at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. He is currently on commission by Imagination Stage, a theater for young audiences, writing a piece at the intersection of gangs and community restoration. He is finishing up a commission by 651 Arts writing and performing an epic verse poem about the hero’s journey of an enslaved youth transformed by the Middle Passage, in the tradition of Homer’s Odyssey.

As an actor, his television credits include recurring roles on Broad City on Comedy Central and Blacklist: Redemption on NBC. He has provided award-winning voice-over for national network commercials, scripted television, radio, and internet. Malik is also the voice of Planet Word, an immersive museum of the English language in Washington D.C. billed as the world’s first voice-activated museum. He’s composed and performed poetry for Webby Award- winning project People Not Property, an historic preservation and educational website for Historic Hudson Valley. He also curates and hosts HHV’s flagship Pinkster celebration, billed as the oldest African-American holiday. Malik created a film interpretation of the first published African-American writer Jupiter Hammon’s poem An Essay on Slavery, on exhibit at Preservation Long Island’s Joseph Lloyd Manor, recognized as a National Literary Landmark. He teaches acting, Shakespeare, Hip Hop theater, Hip Hop, theater arts, and creative writing locally in New York, and internationally.