M. Asli Dukan was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Harlem, New York.[5] Dukan credits her family and childhood for influencing her focus on black consciousness and science fiction.[3][6]
Dukan says she "embraces the futuristic, fantastic and imaginary genres of speculative fiction (SF) as a way to explore the possibilities of social transformation in society."[1][9] She has written, produced and directed several short SF films that have screened in film festivals across the country, the Newark International Film Festival, the ImageNation Film and Music Festival, the Langston Hughes Film Festival and the Blackstar Film Festival.[8][10][11][12] She has contributed to a scholarly edited volume about Afrofuturism and its trends in multiple media.[4] She founded Mizan Media Productions, a multimedia company that centers Afro-diasporic fiction and non-fiction narratives, in 2000.[13] Through her production company she has directed and produced short speculative fiction films, as well as videos for indie artists and arts organizations.[13]
The "Resistance Time Portal," her mixed-media, augmented-reality installation centered on Black radicalism in a futuristic narrative, made its debut in the Distance≠Time exhibition[14][15] at the Icebox Project Space, a contemporary arts and culture venue in Philadelphia.[16][7]
In 2018 Dukan was a judge for the Glyph Comic Awards.[17]
^ abDukan, M. Asli; Wildseeds, Kara (2019). Gunkel, Henriette; Lynch (eds.). "An Afrofuturist time capsule: one point in space-time in the collective consciousness of black speculation" in We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imaginations, Fragments, and Diffractions. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. ISBN9783837646016.