Tamizdat Inc

Artist Mobility Forum: Tamizdat hosts a spirited email-based forum where international cultural mobility stakeholders share news, best practices, and their experiences related to international artist mobility. To join this email-based platform, please contact [email protected].

White Paper Project: Since 2015, Tamizdat’s staff of lawyers and law students has collected and analyzed data regarding thousands of U.S. visa cases where problems were encountered by the international performing arts community. Based on this research, Tamizdat has produced the most comprehensive platform of regulatory reform aimed at improving the efficiency and accountability of the U.S. government’s handling of artist visas. Published in an evolving format as a White Paper on Artist Mobility to the United States. Tamizdat makes its findings and recommendations available to government and advocacy organizations. The White Paper has been widely endorsed by numerous domestic and international arts organizations, NGOs, and private stakeholders, including theInternational Society for Performing Arts, North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents, the Sundance Institute, Western Arts Alliance, Arts Midwest, The Canadian Arts Presenting Association, and the British and Norwegian Musicians Unions. For more information please contact [email protected].

Events: Tamizdat periodically produces events designed to raise the profile of artist mobility issues. Recent events include: Theatre And Resistance, a day-long symposium produced during the APAP 2018 conference in New York, addressing themes of activism and resistance in theater praxis; produced in cooperation with Theatre Without Borders and the CUNY Martin E. Legal Theatre Center, the event was attended by more than 100 theater professionals and practitioners. ContraBanned, a one-off showcase and panel discussion at the South By Southwest 2017 conference, presented artists from the diaspora of the countries impacted by the Trump administration’s first travel Ban; ContraBanned was produced in cooperation with globalFEST, PRI’s The World, and Rock Paper Scissor, was funded in part by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and was very widely covered by U.S. and international media. For more information please contact [email protected].

And yes, "tamizdat" means something! "Samizdat" (from Russian, meaning "self-published") is a word that describes dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. "Tamizdat" ("Published over there") refers to literature and artwork, produced within the Soviet Bloc, but published abroad, often from smuggled manuscripts and masters. Our organization's original focus was on bringing the underground and independent music of newly post-Soviet Central Europe to audiences in Western Europe and the Americas, so the terms seemed an apt one for the work were doing.

Note: The information posted to this page does not constitute legal advice. If you seek specific advice on a specific matter, contact TamizdatAVAIL via telephone or email ([email protected]), or contact a qualified immigration attorney.