Award-Winning Sudanese Filmmaker Mai Elgizouli Moved to New York and Discovered That Making Music Is the Most Intimate of Art Forms

“I was surprised to see you on New York’s Habibi Festival line-up,” I tell Sudanese multidisciplinary artist Mai Elgizouli. She chuckles. “Actually, I was surprised, too,” she says. 

Elgizouli is a familiar name in the Sudanese art cosmos, and Mai is a well-respected, award-winning filmmaker. She is usually seen working alongside her sisters, Hiba, a singer-songwriter, and Sally, a creative director and fashion designer. 

In recent years, Mai’s music videos for Hiba’s songs and artists like Alsarah have introduced a new and unique visual language to contemporary Sudanese culture. I like to think of her as our Solange Knowles.

Her videos earned her a scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media. But since when does Mai Elgizouli sing and do it well enough to perform at a New York-based music festival? 

“Music is a really important part of my journey,” she tells OkayAfrica from a corner in her new school, wearing a black and white animal-print top with huge purple headphones over her short curls. She looks like the quintessential art student. 

“I used to sing with my sister Hiba,” she says. “But it was challenging for me to learn instruments. I’m very energetic and can’t sit down, so the piano was really difficult.” As a teenager, she discovered the guitar and taught herself songwriting. “The guitar brings me the lyrics,” she says. 

Elgizouli never performed her own music and instead sang backup vocals at her sister’s concerts. But when Sudan went through the December Revolution in 2019, she found herself performing a song she had written about Sudanese women in front of a huge crowd of mostly men. “People engaged with me and I felt like ‘wow,’” she says about remembering the energy she could share with people on stage. 

Still, she didn’t think of her songs as a cohesive project or an art form that defines her. At jam sessions with her sisters in Cairo, Egyptian drummer Khaled Eldemerdash asked her, “When will you record your songs? Are you waiting for the end of the world?”

She moved to New York in 2024, at a devastating time for her country; as Sudan was being ravaged by war, there was no space to continue making art. Receiving the scholarship gave her hope in a time that seemed hopeless. 

“I was really overwhelmed with New York,” she says about her first months. “Everything is fast. You cannot say anything deep to anybody, like in the Arab world and in African countries, where we overshare.” 

With her recent history of displacement, when Elgizouli arrived in New York, she had to relearn how to understand herself as a person and artist all over again. She could not step into her usual process of creating visuals, knowing that the location she wanted to use in the shoot was not accessible. 

Music became a comfort and a refuge. “You can’t make art while you’re suffering,” says Elgizouli. “But music is safe and soothing, that’s why it has become my main [form of art] since moving to New York.” 

At open mics in her student housing, she performed Sudanese songs to a group of internationals who didn’t understand the lyrics, but felt her emotions. “They came up and asked me what the songs are about, and we opened deep conversations really fast,” she says. “That’s what I want.” 

These videos reached the organizers of Habibi Festival, an initiative founded by saxophonist/composer Yacine Boulares, curator/producer Meera Dugal, and Joe’s Pub Director Alex Knowlton to celebrate ancient and contemporary music from the SWANA region. 

"I discovered Mai’s music this summer when I was a jury for a grant. Her samples were raw videos of an open mic, but her voice and pure talent stood out so brilliantly,” Boulares tells OkayAfrica. “We’re all so excited to see her perform this week and even more eager to see where her music is going to take her!”

“My first reaction when Habibi Festival reached out was excitement — about what I was going to wear,” laughs Elgizouli. On a more serious note, she looks forward to connecting with people who enjoy vulnerability. 

“They will listen to very, very sad songs,” she says. “Because I have faced very sad things. My brother passed away nine months ago, and I wrote a song about him after just seven days.”

These tracks will eventually become an album with the tentative title Far From Sadness. Mixing classic Sudanese music inspired by the 1980s and 1990s with electric guitars and rock elements, Elgizouli makes a genuine attempt at catharsis both for herself and her listeners. 

“The music is a description of who I — and many people like me who are Sudanese, Arab and living abroad — am,” she says. Despite the hardship and disillusionment she has endured, her words are full of gratitude and optimism.

While most contemporary musicians have a social media plan, a rollout strategy, and ideally professional support to get their name out there, Elgizouli is stumbling from one opportunity to another by virtue of her genuine love for music-making.