mikael burke is a black queer director, deviser, and educator based in chicago.
bio
A Princess Grace Award-winner and two-time Jeff Award-winning director, Mikael is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Acting, in the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, where he teaches in the undergraduate conservatory as well as in the Master’s Directing program. He is a Black Theatre Alliance Award recipient in Directing and was featured as one of New City Magazine’s 50 Players of Chicago in 2023 and 2025.
Mikael’s credits include readings, workshops, and full productions at various Chicago theatres, including Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Northlight Theatre, TimeLine Theatre Company, About Face Theatre, Raven Theatre, American Blues Theatre, Shattered Globe Theatre, Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, The Story Theatre, Jackalope Theatre Company, First Floor Theater, Victory Gardens Theater, American Theatre Company, Chicago Dramatists, Refracted Theatre Company, and Windy City Playhouse. He also regularly works regionally, with theatres such as Yale Repertory Theatre, Theatreworks Colorado Springs, Forward Theatre, Quintessence Theatre Company, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Theaterworks Hartford, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Geva Theatre Center, Phoenix Theatre Cultural Center, Urbanite Theatre, Third Avenue Playworks, and NoExit Performance. Please check out his resume for more.
Mikael holds an MFA in Directing from The Theatre School at DePaul University, where he previously served as Head of the Directing Concentration of the TTS Summer High School Training Program. He is also an Artistic Associate at Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, as well as at About Face Theatre, where he previously served as Associate Artistic Director. He previously served as Northlight Theatre’s inaugural Artistic Fellow, and was a Director’s Inclusion Initiative fellow with Victory Gardens Theatre.
Mikael is a proud member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the national labor union representing professional stage directors and choreographers across the United States.
mission
My theatre brings the marginalized center stage. Through clear storytelling and honest performance, I create experiences as vivid, surprising, and complex, as the characters inside them and the worlds they reflect. I tell stories of people like me, overcoming the visible and invisible systems designed to keep us down. I tell stories of people fighting to be seen, heard, and loved, stories about the families we fight with, and fight for, and who choose to fight for us, stories that reflect the full spectrum of our lives. I actively dismantle harmful narratives by revealing our shared humanity within the radical specificity of these experiences, inspired by who we’ve been, who we are now, and who we hope to become.
vision
When we come to the theatre to share in witnessing a story, we silently make a pact: for just a while, we all agree to believe what unfolds before our eyes. The imaginary becomes real because we believe it. And when that belief is rewarded, our experience is transcendent, our hearts and minds are changed.
My theatre is fosters and celebrates imagination and belief. Rather than Realism, I practice Feelism; stagecraft that feels real, visceral, and honest in experience, regardless of whether it appears real in presentation. Impression and suggestion are my playthings because they rely entirely upon what sets theatre apart from its sister mediums: the audience’s live presence in the moment. They are the final character in the room, sharing in the creation of the story. Like Black church and Ballroom, the experience of my work is active, participatory, call and response, communion, and through this, audiences inevitably pour themselves into the work and the story.
While we all experience the world individually, in my theatre, imagination becomes the great equalizer, inviting all of us to find ourselves and our own experiences within those specific experiences of another. This act of belief proves that beyond our unignorable differences and many truths, we are all simply human, a story I wholeheartedly believe will make our world less fearful and so much more loving.
more
1.
My relationship with church is non-existent now, but as a child, I remember sitting in pews, feet dangling, next to my mom, my little brother next to me, both of us rocking this week’s matching outfits. We listened raptly to Rev. Allen wield the Word, and I witnessed the congregation lean in and call back. As soon as we were old enough to talk, we were thrust onto that same stage, singing in the youth choir, reading poems for Easter, even performing in small, no-budget “musicals” at Christmas. Theatre took hold of my heart before I knew what it was. I remain fascinated by the dynamic relationship between performance and audience.
2.
Despite an aversion to most forms of “homework,” I shined brightest in my creative projects in school, taking themes and ideas from books and history and making something in response. I brimmed with ideas, and my creations were big and bold. Music videos made via powerpoint, multi-scene dioramas made to look like props from the stories, a performance of female-identity and colorism involving the Birth of Venus and fabric-blood. The thrill of translating two-dimensional words-on-a-page into resonant three-dimensional experience gave me purpose, which still fuels my artistry today.
3.
Once upon a time, a boy-who-lived showed me that changing the world is as simple as changing the story. At 14, I wasn’t a wizard, but I was a young, black, neuro-spicy, fantasy-loving kid struggling to accept my sexuality—different, in a world that hated difference. But Harry’s story offered me a new world, and more importantly, a new way of loving myself in this one. As Harry learned his own difference was his undeniable strength, I, too, learned to love myself fiercely. This is the power of story. I tell stories to rewrite the stories we’re told, so we can all love ourselves a bit more and a bit better.
4.
In college, after a brief and terrible stint as a Vocal Performance major, I crossed over to the dark side and explored theatre properly for the first time. I acted, I built costumes, I designed sound and video, I SMed (never again!) I learned to tell stories every which way I could, and I discovered that the only limit to what’s possible on stage is the limit of our imagination. That imaginative freedom paired with the immersion in a multiplicity of storytelling mediums, learning how they each uniquely can communicate ideas and make meaning has certainly made me into the monster I am today.
5.
As our country divides more and more every day, kindness becomes a radical, political act. We gain so much from approaching one another with open-hearted curiosity, respect, active listening, and trust. This is what collaboration means to me, marching alongside my fellow artists, acknowledging the limits of my own perspective while relishing in the multiplicity of perspectives surrounding me. I ignite the spark in others to be extraordinary storytellers in their own right, and simply offer inspired direction.