 Hi, I'm Susie Sikorsky. I'm a Fulbright U.S. student for the 2016-2017 year. I had came to the United Arab Emirates and the American University of Sharjah two years ago in the fall 2014 semester. I came through International Exchange Office as well as a CIEE program and right away I matriculated into art history courses. I took a course with Dr. Martin Giesen, a Michelangelo course, as well as a visual arts course painting the practice of color with Professor David Hewitt. I came here knowing that I wanted to pursue contemporary Middle Eastern art. I knew Cercal in Dubai had a growing scene, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah Art Museum, so I was in a right place to do that and through my experience actually in a painting course I had seen a Saudi artist Tamer Khalil. He was finishing his CAD in architecture but I had seen him painting in the back of Dr. Professor Hewitt's class and he immediately I was drawn to him and I just started talking to him about his experiences and the painting had no borders to it. It was white and I asked him what's the meaning of this and he says I want to live in a border-free environment. You know I don't want to be constricted by different ways of painting or playing music or creating architecture. I want to just kind of be very free and liberated when I create art and that experience alone turned into hours of interviewing him and it was this first moment where I knew I loved interviewing. I loved learning not only about his art techniques but about growing up, how he became an artist in not only the Middle East but in the Arabian Peninsula as a Saudi Arabian artist. How I was able to apply to this Fulbright was constantly speaking with the AUS CAD professors, Professor David Hewitt as well as you know Dr. Giesen who actually you know accepted to be my Fulbright advisor so he was constantly talking to me about my thesis when I was applying because it was during that same time of me trying to create my undergrad thesis while also applying to the Fulbright. So I was constantly sending emails back and forth with him and he was advising me a bit as well as Professor David Hewitt in terms of you know more about artists in the Emirates, Emirati heritage, how that's manifested in the artwork itself so they were helping me all the time with that. I have two different projects I'm doing for my Fulbright scholarship. I have one where I'm going to be assisting the curator of the 35th annual Emirates Fine Arts Society exhibition. It is the longest running exhibition in the entire Arabian Peninsula as well as the oldest exhibition space in the oldest practicing art collective society in the UAE starting forming in 1980. So I will be helping assist Nasser Abdullah the curator for this exhibition and what naturally came out of that was being able to combine all of my interviews that I've been doing since my time here in October and creating a website, creating a platform and I feel that it's very difficult when you read there's so much you know resources nowadays. You can look at in magazines that are covering Middle Eastern artists from Lebanon and Syria and North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula but there is no specific website that's showcasing interviews, specifically interviews with Khalidji artists. So I wanted to showcase and show a light show window into these studios because most of these times I am interviewing them in their studios. Older, younger Khalidji artists and just exactly shedding light on their experiences and there's drastically differences in terms of growing up pre-oil, post-oil, three generations. They're all having so many different historical narratives which parallel comes to art historical narratives and I've noticed and there's many exhibitions that are shedding a light on to this. There's a gap. I mean everyone knows it. There's a gap between these older and younger artists and the only way to bridge this gap is dialogue.