Michael McMillan

Michael McMillan
McMillan at the British Library, February 2016
Born	1962 High Wycombe, UK
Occupation	Playwright, artist/curator
Notable work	The West Indian Front Room

Michael McMillan (born 1962) is a British playwright, artist/curator and educator, born in England to parents who were migrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). As an academic, he focuses his research on "the creative process, ethnography, oral histories, material culture and performativity". He is the author of several plays, and as an artist is best known for his first installation, The West Indian Front Room, which was exhibited with great success in 2005, attracting more than 35,000 visitors in its initial outing at the Geffrye Museum, and going on to inspire a BBC Four documentary called Tales from the Front Room (2007), a website a 2009 book, The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, and various international commissions, such as Van Huis Uit: The Living Room of Migrants in the Netherlands (Imagine IC, Amsterdam, and Netherlands Tour, 2007–08) and A Living Room Surrounded by Salt (IBB, Curaçao, 2008). A more recent installation of the Walter Rodney Bookshop featured as part of the 2015 exhibition No Colour Bar at the Guildhall Art Gallery.

McMillan has said of the range of his work: "I was a painter before I was a playwright/dramatist and through making live art pieces and writing critically about performance, photography, visual arts culture, I have come home in a sense to fine arts, through making mixed-media installations, which given my interest in performativity background can be seen also as theatre sets. My work and practice is often interdisciplinary using mixed media, installations and performance."

Michael McMillan was born in High Wycombe, UK, of Caribbean migrant heritage; as he has said, "Both my parents came from St Vincent & the Grenadines and ... were 'arrivants', to use Edward Kamau Brathwaite's term, from colonies where they were imbued with English culture." Given this background, he has said, "I grew up with learning three languages: the creole spoken by my parents as a fusion of an English lexicon and an African grammar; the Jamaican English spoken on the streets of Hackney and around London and the London English spoken at school." He won an essay competition, run by Len Garrison's ACER (Afro-Caribbean Education Resource), and after going to FESTAC 77 (the Second World Festival of African Arts and Culture), he wrote his play The School Leaver (1978), which was produced at the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writers' Festival.