Mikaal Sulaiman walked off the stage at Radio City Music Hall on June 7 holding a Tony Award and a piece of Broadway history. His win for Best Sound Design of a Play, for the revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” made him the first Black designer to take the category in its history, a recognition for a craft that rarely shares the spotlight with the actors and directors it supports.
A First In A Category That Has Existed Twice
The Tony for Best Sound Design of a Play was created in 2008, with Mic Pool winning the inaugural prize for “The 39 Steps.” The Tony administration discontinued both sound categories after 2014, then brought them back in 2018. Across that uneven timeline, no Black designer had won until Sulaiman’s name was called this year.
He prevailed over a competitive field that included Justin Ellington for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” Tom Gibbons for “Oedipus,” Lee Kinney for “The Fear of 13,” and Josh Schmidt for “Bug.” The win was also a measure of persistence: Sulaiman had been nominated in the same category before, for the 2022 revival of “Macbeth,” and lost. This time the result changed.
The Work Behind The Win
Sulaiman’s task on “Death of a Salesman” was a technical problem disguised as an artistic one. The Winter Garden Theatre is a large house, and Miller’s play is dense, interior, and built on the unraveling thoughts of a single man. In an interview with Live Design, Sulaiman described prioritizing intimacy, designing the sound so that every voice reached the audience as if it came directly from the actor rather than from the theater’s speaker system.
That approach was rooted in his early involvement. He told Playbill he was attached to the production “from day one, through tech and previews,” tracking director Joe Mantello’s evolving ideas from the first rehearsal. The revival, which opened April 9 and runs through August 9, led the 2026 ceremony with six wins, including Best Revival of a Play and Best Direction of a Play for Mantello, alongside design honors for scenic designer Chloe Lamford and lighting designer Jack Knowles. Laurie Metcalf also took home an acting Tony for the production.
A Path From Rochester To The Tony Stage
Sulaiman’s route to the win runs through several disciplines. Originally from Rochester, New York, and now based in Los Angeles, he works as a sound designer and composer. He earned a BFA from the University of the Arts and studied the Jacques Lecoq approach to avant-garde theater at the London International School of Performing Arts, a movement-based tradition that informs how he thinks about staging and rhythm.
His Broadway credits trace a steady climb. He made his Broadway debut designing 2021’s “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” followed by the “Macbeth” revival with Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga that earned him his first Tony nomination. His broader body of work includes the Pulitzer-winning “Fat Ham,” “Doubt” with Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan, and “Enemy of the People” with Jeremy Strong. Beyond the marquee titles, he founded the media production company Moor Noor and created “Black Enso,” a podcast built around sonic essays and conversations with artists about their creative process. His honors before this year included an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence and a Creative Capital Award. He is already set to design the upcoming revival of “Other Desert Cities.”
Why The Recognition Lands Where It Does
The significance of the win sits in where it happened on the awards ladder. Black artists have broken ground on Broadway as performers, playwrights, and directors over the decades, but the design and technical categories, the below-the-line crafts that build a show’s physical and sonic world, have remained among the least diverse corners of the industry. Sound design is among the most invisible of those crafts, judged by an audience that is meant not to notice it.
Sulaiman’s award puts a name and a face to that work and establishes a precedent in a category that had gone its entire existence without a Black winner. For designers coming up behind him, particularly those drawn to the technical side of theater rather than the stage, the result is a concrete marker that the field’s highest honor is reachable.
The Tony does not change the quiet nature of the job. Sulaiman will return to designing soundscapes meant to disappear into the story. What changed on June 7 is the record, and the fact that the next Black sound designer chasing this category now has someone who got there first.
