 that is how to get here and stay here, and it's difficult in many ways. So we'll start out by having all five of our panels with short performance in one of the many areas that they create art. There'll be music, readings, experiments, just be open to it, enjoy. And then after that, we'll moderate the talk for about 20, 30 minutes with everyone, and then happy that it's happening now. We're being here, and thank you all for bringing your meetings. Getting close. Everyone was 5,000 inches of the building. Her own close. To distract her from the sound of bombs, getting closer and closer, and regaining with her appearance suddenly. Shut up, damn it! She received information in the form of images of people she knew of others who looked like people soldier missing on a dead body, bones, life evidence, level cookies that had been moving in her soil for hundreds of years, animals that cherished that, brought a smell of blood. She knew about the shaking walls, shaking bulging eyes of survivors. She wouldn't flinch years later. Her spurs, Karen, Gloria, and those who don't follow her every day. You do this? A wedding? Because it was all I got. It was a phone call five months ago. A voicemail after three years of waiting, three and a half years of waiting, and then she got back to work, and then she got back to work, and then she got back to work, and then she got back to work, and then she got back to work, and then she got back to work, and then she got back to work, and then she got back to work, and then she got back back to work, and then she got back to work. She spent eight years waiting, three and a half years of planning, telling me you changed your mind. So, why should I believe anything you say to me right now? Because if they find out how long I have been here, I won't be allowed back here so please please don't bring it up please do not do that to me again unless you're sure I felt like I had a key the key in my hands I have never felt that before in my entire life there were things I was finally able to really imagine for myself I was gonna join the world I live in the world you got to live in for three and a half years then you called I've had to rely on other people and hiding and secrets for the last 13 years of my life for every for just basic human and illegally all of it all of it's been illegal I went to school illegally I learned illegally I walk I walk the streets illegally I literally am when I'm walking I am illegally walking walking is illegal because I didn't get some some paper means I cannot be a full person here go ahead with this with all of it a drift by Balfie a shipping container of rubber ducklings made in China the US washed overboard in 1992 and some of them traveled and washed ashore for 17,000 miles over 15 years let's go ahead and assume it's yellow what little of science I know it's plastic skin invincible against saltwater but not the sun can only ask so much will it fade or brown what I mean to say is I wouldn't want one of these for my daughter it's internal clock set to the mercy of the currents that have been predictable for centuries but mercy is not the word anyone would choose sometimes not a consensus floating are the same thing each wave is its own beginning and ending through international waters we could have caused an incident no no never reaching the hands that hold for you rough immigrants or free refugee floating flagless fading border stamped with words but not remain where you're bringing me you do drugs do you sell drugs you sell drugs what kind of drugs where you live where you from where small what's in the bag how I'm gonna be in the United States how I'm gonna be in Canada what are you doing there what are you doing what do you do for work are you working isn't that what people like right famous what's in the bag please I don't need to sit I don't need you coming with me you have one chance to tell the truth you're lying to me you think I'm stupid how much money do you make what do you work you sell drugs what do you love where do you want to be what's in the bag what's in the bag what's your plate number how do you think about jail time if I go to a party a big party lots of rich people are looking champagne you got sexy ladies there are everything and there's cocaine and you buy some good time and then you go to the bathroom and you take a shit and I asked you what you did last night and you told me you took a shit would you be lying no but 20 whether you took a shit or not hey calm down calm down listen to me this is a good job in the morning or I can let you go okay you want to be locked up you're looking at it a few years yeah who knows have you ever been charged with a crime what kind of criminal are you what kind of last name is that citizen of citizen of please look at that no please look to this order take this folder and that's great for me you have a good job where you're living with you work are you working are you lazy are you liberal are you like sports you think you're hot you think you can do whatever you want where do you live where do you think you live where do you think you are who do you think you are you're what you do what hold on hold on hold on I'm trying to understand let me get this straight so you're lying to me look at you look at you you don't go I'm joking what is your dad before what's in the bag do you have any party problems will you be a public charge why are you poor dumb bitch what do you bring in but you tell your camera I thought step over there can I see that what's this take two okay so you leave yourself you can't bring you can't bring anything except your clothes and your folder documents you check your pockets for any foreign objects every time I go to a USCIS facility it's dismal outside it's really really dark and gloomy you enter an office building usually it's just some generic concrete office building downtown you go down a set of generic stairs past the generic door and into a generic hallway where there was a single mini machine and then a bunch of lock doors a couple stories below you're totally alone the walls and floor tile are sleepy fainting creams with dark brown rubber baseboards and you can't tell if it's clean or sturdy and you're unsure if they're supposed to be there there's an elevator at the end of this hall you go to it press the button and there's some grinding pieces after about two minutes the doors and you step into the car it feels old and the clear plastic floor indicators have seemed to sound right to translucent as they light up one by one until floor six at which point there are no more floor indicators but the elevator keeps calling for another minute or so you really can't talk about fast it's not a sudden you wait a little bit and you're in a generic waiting area with a few generic security guards you recognize the aura of spit and tape your office the thing that nobody wants to help you and that this process is in the verge of being completely abandoned that you could possibly wait forever for a procedure that no longer exists here and there in the seats are people who seem careful some of them angry some of them dead not many of them are white someone comes from another corridor the security guard tells me to take that you clutch your generic folder documents which are several dozen photos of you and your partner at a beach in Italy on an awkward date eating Persian food standing with family moving into a new apartment in a hospital I grew up hearing all sorts of stories about the world of the grid this beacon of order despite this hollowness it's a powerhouse of energy a vessel for any shaker it carries us and it provides us access to different groups I should tell you about the story of how I came to land on my grid with less of a I've always broken up to the sound of a cuckoo clock a quarter one back in Tuesday when I decided to that day was the day that I witnessed the cuckoo burn the clock break its head on its way first right before my very eyes and so I did I collected myself and I left everything behind except my mirror and the cuckoo clock mirror the same clock we in the middle is how I glitched my way to grid perfect start o'clock at 6.07 opens up its hand reaches out to me and I travel I visit other grids and I visit other shape-shifters like myself I also am a collector I collect gear I engineers who work in corporate life and I specialize in exchanging with other shifters indeed in return I take back the parts that look nothing like me I wear them till they become me and I exchange them and I am not escaping I refused to accept the rule of the struggle of shape-shifter my family's grid lost light and energy a long time ago they kept recognizing my warm-up sheets but I kept a lot of the gear and gave them my cellular modifier my loved ones they still see but clocks had stopped reaching out to send me there and I also kept a lot of the gear they kept my memory cards the last grid I visited was a shit show my friend lost his eyes, ears and fingertips right before mine I forgot about the gear and couldn't exchange anything at all so I have successfully navigated all of the unrealistic expectations of an androgynoid in our society and I now welcome the head of this messenger once again I want to know where I am you lost all power hold your breath through you look gently with your inner eye to grab onto anything that has left your fingertips you've been floating around with eyes, ears and fingertips playing everywhere this force in the water destroyed your two liters of skin after this much time you're a bacterial infection contaminating the water for everyone for the past five days you've always been back to demand and jumped back in they've always jumped back in you demanded to keep control over your own secret mind but your anchor got loose, your wounds and your head has not yet risen above the surface what did you think would rise from beneath your feet? rise over the water you've always told one thing land I hope you know what that means by so this is from a musical that I've been working on since last year and this is one of the new songs that I have written and it's very fresh this is the first song I've ever played into anywhere and I'm excited about it so just a little with my lips through my lips I'm silent myself I'm spiraling when I was eight on the roof of a secret cave here to wake caught on the bone wall I love them though I didn't I'd tell another love when I was twelve Maria was a wild beauty in Pedro she was surviving behind never forget it was summertime I was 16 the girls they called him unseen each artist amazing we should have a long time we're going to meet performances wonderful alright so we're going to get into the discussion part of this talk visa one more I don't know if there's a four in a year or not let's discuss all of this so let's start off by maybe briefly each one of you just kind of talking about your journey in getting your work visa here in the United States so let's start off with you John Phillip very briefly I'm a Canadian I went to school in New York and then wanted to stay after I went on a student visa you can stay for like a year so I stayed for a year I had a life going here I partnered I went back to visit my family knowing that I would figure out maybe an O1 or something like that and just going to visit my family I got back in I got detained at the border and they accused me of a bunch of stuff that wasn't true and I basically was just too young and inexperienced so they named me sign this paper that said I was trying to really believe and then I was banned for two years and my partner was in the audience and I shared an apartment with other people at the time and all that was just lost for me in my country for those two years they accused me and eventually I tried to leave an O1 I cracked twice both times we were declined I think my lawyer wasn't good enough and I didn't want to shell out for every big expensive one at the time eventually we found it so hard to visit we were trying to visit each other like every two months in New York then we decided to get married so we could actually just have a relationship so we did got married in Toronto City Hall and it took about three years after that of waiting three and a half years to get my pretty heart and then I did while you were waiting for you couldn't work right? I had to be in Toronto so I couldn't be here at all because I couldn't work here so I had to be here five years ago with my partner who had a job at a university I was on a B for Peace Up which meant that I was a defendant I couldn't work and what happened is I was at a party and I was telling a story about how I spent to these lawyers and how I spent four years in Lebanon in court fighting a censorship case and I was explaining to them the trouble about communicating with people who usually do the interrogation who are I believe that we do use the same vocab but we don't have the same definition maybe of that vocab so it's very hard to communicate with somebody who's interweighting you for some reason they refuse to understand what you're saying and I had spent four years going from one court to the other because of a show that I did they tried to pay a prostitution a case on us but we didn't have there was nothing so they were like oh this is basically in French they call it a tantalomal it's when you you do something that is that obnoxious that inflames the morality the general morality of what we did and I was like proud of myself after four years we were with it and they made me sign a paper that says I will never go on stage and pretend to sell people so I was proud of myself because four years later I did the show and I went in every street living on with a guy in a box pretending to sell him I was like yeah the story and the lawyers were like listen what's going on with your papers I was like I can't do much I'm not working how about your case and I'm just going to share the name of this little firm right now and I have their contact and they do take they have an application that is always open for artists who come from countries that who might have experienced censorship or people who might be coming from countries that are artists like right now they have this big campaign for people from Ukraine they have a big project for people from Venezuela so they're always working with artists they're called I have contact with everybody who needs this and they were like very efficient they got me a work visa and sometime later I got my green card Hi I'm John I came here from Turkey to study musical theater and after that I went to stay in this country and after it was a little bit of a bigger matter I went to go to military service go back home because we have military service in Turkey or I had to finally stay in this country so I went to additional grad schools to gain more time for myself and that's what I've done and during the my grad school education I've done a lot of writing that was included in the part of it I had to write a one course of show and that actually opened up a whole another world for me which I had no idea because I came here to become an actor but I didn't know that also there was a writer for me and so that became actually the main focus of my life because once I came into this country I had to stay in this country because I was gay and I couldn't have the chance to be back home and there was a very pretty difficult situation so I knew that the moment that I came here I had to get the visa so I was always in the back of my head to find some ways to do that so after I wrote my show and I performed it in South Carolina which was a very gay Muslim show and it was just like people walked out of the show which was perfect for me and then I was like okay I need to because I lived in New York before so I wanted to come back to New York and do more of that so after graduating I had my one year work permission which was open to and then I stayed in New York and I just submitted my work anywhere I could find anywhere who would take basically and then that just actually started to pick up which is write and perform and write and perform and write so I happened to be like a year doing shows maybe like eight different shows so that I could prove myself that I could stay here and there was a lawyer that I was working with who thought that my case was not gonna work so she dropped me in the middle of working together and that was also the time to other artists from Turkey other artists who are also dealing with the situation of trying to get visa so in one of my shows I invited one of the other Turkish artists that I knew who also went through the same process and then she came to see my show and after the show she was like so what's going on with your visa situation so is there anything I can help you with and I told her about how the lawyer dropped me and all that stuff so then she gave me her contact information earlier who was also Turkish so that kind of helped a little bit and so then we started just working on the case and all the documentation and I reached out to the the theaters that I have relationships with and you know in the movie Teresa and the break was very supportive and which Michael was very grateful and then at the end of it it was at the end of it I got my Apple One application so halfway through the panel I'm hearing this common theme of lawyers something along the way and yeah okay let's hear Hange sir yeah Hange doesn't really want to die or something I feel like my mind was like hard but that's okay so any committee or for I came here school and the OBT visa which I did work with in the street for a year and then applying for a loan that was in ordeal and the first application I made was back then and that first application got denied I resubbed the same application with no changes whatsoever the coloring orange and I got approved it was and I got approved and that was 2021 and then I went to once you get approved the visa the visa itself and because I'm a British national and it was also the normal lockdown I couldn't go to the British embassy to the visa itself so I ended up going to Madrid because it was the closest embassy that was still functioning in Covid and I went to Madrid they have the government approve better in their hand and the officer says you don't qualify for the visa today and I'm like wait you have the and why didn't I qualify so then I spiral a little bit more during lockdown and eventually I ended up going to Singapore which is where I was born I go to Singapore to get the visa and then it's my lawyer's wishes I know there's the best embassy experience I've ever had never go anywhere else they approved that and I ran and out 20 minutes later the embassy officer you'll get an answer back tomorrow so good so yeah so I got approved I was so sorry I looked eight months after number one before my second yeah so I am one of the super super British ones who really wanted a lot of meat I wanted a lot of meat cards but until then though you had a journey yes my family had a plan for such a long time I think we had gotten that we may be expecting a green card we had plans to fly just as a visit visa we were actually getting ready to prepare the visit visa when after we went there we got news that we actually have been we've been traveling and we've got to go do that over again for a couple of years my family chose to move before I did I stayed back in the US for industry years I thought I would quote and Trump had just got an offer so I was like but no it was it was crazy of me to have stayed when I had green cards so I picked up a move and my immigration chronicles blew up a little bit more after I decided I'm not going to travel to Bay River 6 once I'm going to stay here in there and get connected you'll settle a bit that was 2019 and it just so happened the four years after 2019 were the most difficult and traumatic years in Lebanon's recent history and they watched it through and through and I would say this was my difficulty in just being here and understanding what I'm doing but actually all of the bureaucratic processes were quite that they were easy each of you have your own special journey obviously something more fortunate than others so now you're here you have your visa and you can now hindsight as 2020 through your skit I kind of feel that you went through a lot of hell but do you feel like you have done anything differently I mean it feels like it can also depend it's a very subjective thing it can depend on the person that's interviewing you so how has this whole process affected you and what would you have done differently if you would I mean on a personal level I think the waiting in my life the waiting like oh I could have been six months I could have been six months I wouldn't do that I would either I think I would say it could come ten years so I can kind of dig into my life as it is and then make plans if it happens because I think there was a period where I've been waiting for so long I think it's wrong on an obvious level I think I had a lot of thinking about the border and just in terms of like not understanding state power what happens when a state wants to protect its border and who's your rights I approached it kind of and I didn't make like serious plans for something went wrong so to my younger I said like take it very seriously take it very seriously and how to approach the border and now I have a green card I have a notebook where I know that I'm protected by a certain kind of right but before that when I was going back and forth I don't like this this is not good I think but my younger's got it for the ways I had to not be around a border situation and yeah I had been through different I had been through bureaucracy in Europe I had to admit this is easier I do do as much easier Europe is like doesn't it but there are things that might happen like personally I took it very seriously I was young when I came I went around finding every time somebody quoted me on any whatever newspaper in whatever corner in whatever paper in whatever moment anything that had my mention I went and asked a friend how should I go about it they don't tell you exactly what they want you have to guess which ends up being everything so okay this is everything I have and my friend was very straightforward I don't think they read through it but I'm sure they wait so just be adding stuff to it the bigger the better yeah the bigger the better so I was like okay I went and started adding some collecting stuff from everywhere when I went to the embassy I was very worried because I had had experience with the American Embassy throughout my life and it was the first time where I was entering the US so I entered it and I remember my daughter was like no I don't like it no I don't like it and in fact this is how I got away with it I entered and I stayed like this and the person who went through the paper and the obnoxious security people who are most of them Lebanese like one of them was like hey you could look at so I did I contained myself from all these little aggression and it feels to me that these embassies all embassies do that to test us they want to see if we can take it if you can keep that mouth shut throughout this process you might go there and you'll have to learn to keep your mouth shut too so that was the process and then here I got lucky as I said with these lawyers and they did help us a lot they helped both of us actually they ended up doing the whole thing they do that and it was still Trump and then we got a call and they said you're a work permit and we were like it's still locked out but still I mean it's a good thing and few like a year later we got the green card which was completely magical because I have friends who have been here for 12 years who are still reviewing all of these it was like this and it feels like because I asked I was asking several of my friends and it feels like if you think it's stuck somewhere it might stay stuck for a long time so so and you might not know exactly what is it about it that is making it stuck but yeah I feel like I agree with all of that and I feel like Donald Trump's show shouldn't have like a warning he's gone through the conversation the disease to just watch it I think it's something in terms of the question I don't think there's anything I would have done I mean I guess if I lived through it I think I would just try to work it harder it's just that I think I was one of the lucky ones in terms of knowing what I had to do because my situation was so to me it was like a life or death kind of a deal so I was like I have to stay here so to me from the moment that I took a step into New York I was looking forward for ways to get myself to stay here so it's when I was lucky to actually found my way in writing and it was about myself it was about my own story it was about my own experiences so that's one of the things about what makes you special what makes you unique so I'm actually lucky that I found that path for myself already while I was here so that was actually very helpful but I think there is some sort of like a magical aspect of like having those embassy moments and like you just like basically submit everything and let everything unlock just to happen if it happens so my experience with the embassy was like when you get your approval you have to leave the country so somewhere else and go to an embassy there and apply in person to get interviewed so once I was there I was in the line and I was just actually kind of holding a little bit of luck here about that too because like there was this person who was sewing my application and he was like oh what do you do so are you famous so like those are the questions which they ask because it's a visa that Daniel got with and like Daniel Craig holds it all in it's the same visa but then he just stays like still silent and I was like okay so it's going on and he was like okay I can I'm just looking for your through your things and I was just like standing there and then he said oh I'm sorry I'm just like so who do you think that he just kept asking me like a lot of different questions and I was so thrown off that I felt really horrible because I'm like am I answering these questions right and there was another silence and another person was getting rejected on the left side yes I'm hearing that she tried to do this like marriage fraud thing that she got caught on the spot like I'm hearing all this as I'm trying to go through my own experience and then the person goes on the interviewer is like oh I can't find her document tissue so I'm just going to hold out to your passport and you'll let me know and I was like oh okay so it's and then I left building but then I was like okay wait how do I wait so I went back in and all the people were like there are tenders so I was like so what's going on what do I do and they said oh they'll let me know in like two days so it's been two days and I didn't hear anything and it's been five days and I got an email saying your passport has been sent to the address that you selected and I'm like but I still don't know if I got it or not so until I went through I went to the post office grabbed my passport and had to go through the pages I did not know if I got it did you get it? I did I did but it was like like the biggest moment like because you work so hard for this and then you go through that and you're like oh there it is but at the same time I heard another friend of mine who's getting reiterated for every single documentation that she submitted to like explain what did you do there what was the dates of your performance who was there, who how to do this like who did this, who did that because I was lucky that they could have found the documentation that they couldn't ask me anything my interview was like two minutes so it was lucky that it was also not so like I think there is some sort of a magical aspect of luck that plays a lot in this process but at the same time I think what helps me very much during all the things and going back to the question is that knowing exactly what I have to do and basically just like getting into that direction yeah well I what do you agree with I actually think it's the whole it's like I feel like 10% of your application and 90% of what you know what you just said in one of my interviews was that I feel like my application was set to a certain random pencil pusher or not who denied it for a time so it's so many the same with actually getting the results having to go through that twice and getting it in the second time like there's just no rhyme or reason I mean my ultimate in the end result anyone who's going through it in the future will know there's just no rhyme or reason like you just do your best you just do what you're something that you're asked for submit it and just it's just like sending it to the void and hoping it comes back with a hoping to get a part of the response but yeah there's just no rhyme or reason to attend it yes it is just like it was meant to be here so that's actually how it felt like and I think because of that and after having spent four years away from Beirut watching it all kind of collapse in front of me, had me thinking about my privilege a lot in the context of hierarchy of Lebanese in the words privilege but it got confusing as a person and as an artist to think about the hierarchy of privilege here it got suffocating I don't know I was feeling like my feelings didn't match my bias and I had a lot of memory loss I had this need to get out of survival I needed to make sense of why I'm here and why what am I seeing, how my experience was through a stream but I think that it was it was a matter of urgency to get out of survival in order to be connected and it manifested artistically as an actor I was in posture syndrome I couldn't make sense of how to get out of it but after every crisis controlling in there was many people that don't beyond it and changing the way that I listened and understanding not just my privilege but also the privilege around me that figuring out why in retrospect putting in all this effort to make sense take boxes shape shift in certain ways to to relay myself in a certain way in the context of being aware of being in all this pain and not seeing the world really feel it but I think that now a lot of the survivors guilt dissolved I think that watching a genocidal on-phone of the Palestinian people by the Israeli occupation is also showing me that they're going to go through and then their guilt is being, there's guilt being enforced onto them like no one should be guilty and it was so some of you had to obviously need your country to come here and maybe others it wasn't as oppressing for example, you know, we think Canada is a pretty modern country and we would think that many of the cities there have opportunities to artists such as yourselves so why come here and do you, was it all worth it? Yes, it was worth it for many reasons and that's a little discovery I think I wasn't sure it was worth it when I got here and there's a disorientation about whether you make the right choice you put so much, you kind of feel like you put in a fork in the road and you can't go back you can put all this into it so there's kind of that some cost thing for me, love the way because I get to be with my partner and we've been done a bit of the way around but there's a choice that we made and again once we've walked into these long processes and the other thing I'll say is that I, as a Peay and someone with a lot of privilege and even you could say more privilege in an American because of our social services there was something there was something about being in America as an artist that felt like I needed to be worth the most this is controversial for me to say but as a Peayancourt now America is like the center of people that's being made, like the center of empire and like Canada is like where your parents are now so I was always interested in coming here to kind of reflect that more and just figure out how it was a little bit and I really, I really believe in those relationships so my goal is to have a goal and I wanted to be able to be both Well I think we're all international artists here too, right? So you had to come here obviously and so how is that international artists here in the United States and particularly in New York tell us some of that I'm good with people and to be fair that through where I couldn't work two years where I couldn't work I went around and introduced myself to every artist, every theater every space I could and I the greetings for everyone I met and whenever I would be invited to a workshop or to whatever I made sure to be there which is also an advantage I had because I couldn't work but some people who can't work because they don't have paper have to go and work and there are to be fair it's a city New York is a city that is still very helpful for those refugees, immigrants you will find a job in the service industry you will find these theater or spaces that are willing to take you in and to be like listen we're not going to take you now but you know I'm going to stay with us and once your papers are going to be here you will have a job you will have a place with us I have a lot of friends, I made a lot of friends people who were willing to sign me papers that said that I was going to work with them and that was very helpful also there are festivals that cater for immigrants and people who are coming from abroad so this is always very helpful now when I left living on the situation had gone so bad that it was obvious that I couldn't go back there but to be fair I'm also somebody who works in the performing arts and the theater industry and this is New York I'm not going to lie to myself New York and it's been delivering and I had some amazing friends I had some great artists and I'm still meeting and being you know and you know blossoming of it is all these amazing artists and I find this very magical and it allowed me just to glance at it because if you live under these states of oppression and creativity is you know they tell you oh you have to suffer to make art this is not true sometimes it happens but it's not necessarily true for everyone it's not true for the majority few people manage to do it good for them thank you but no you need to make distance you need to have electricity and water and you need to have access to a certain to actually to art and to creativity to be able to do something again so this has been a great opportunity for me to still although I wasn't paying so John you you've been an activist for Muslim gay immigrant stories as well and in your work how does that happen and you also advise students right that you teach down in the University of South Carolina I've done that okay so not anymore where you used to but I'm sure you give advice to a lot of budding artists as well yeah it's like I think it's been very it's exhausting it's so much work it's so like everyone sitting here besides you I feel had to prove so much and I think that takes away so much from you because if like if you're not going to get yourself in a place where oh I have to do all these things to be equal to my college friend who just graduated it could do this like five years ago I am just able to do it so like that kind of if you go into that kind of thinking I think it gets a little bit in your head you're like oh and I could have done that I could have done this I could have done that but I feel like it all happens for a reason and I feel like I'm talking about luck and this always happens the way that it's supposed to be and it's like whenever I ever talk to any students or like any one who comes to me and it's like oh how did you do it how can I do it and how what you tell me is that I try to say that like try to find what makes you do try to find what makes you special and kind of go for that and try to try to build on that and and that's difficult you know not everyone always is like oh I know what I'm going to do I know what I'm supposed to do this is what I'm supposed to do like it doesn't work that way and you don't get to actually have the time to be like oh let me just try this and try that and try this and let me find what it actually works for me but I also always try to say to figure out if you want to say you're not a little earlier than maybe you should have or maybe you should have thought but then that's another difficult thing too how do you know as an 18-19 year old who just came to New York for the first time ever in your life and to be like oh I know this is the place where I'm going to live and make money and work all this and pay all the lawyers and stay near and actually just raise every single thing that I've done that can take me or like back in another country like basically all my family there and just like be here for the rest of my life and actually convince them also to be okay like it's a lot to there for someone who just considered for their undergraduate education or even grad school it's heavy I think and it's difficult and you know and it's like I think there's a lot of figuring out and like committing that happens and then once you do that and then there's a lot of questions that comes after so when do I go home? do I ever go home? and one of the things that I want to do is to be able to bring what I've done what I've seen here to back home so that I can show people that you can do this this is what you want to do if you can't live in this conditions in this country or anywhere in the world like where the Muslim population is and then you're in one of the LGBTQ community and you want to do this like it's possible there are people here like you said they're willing to help you there are people who will give you a job under the table or any way that you can oh there will be connections that will happen if you are willing to do that but at the same time it's difficult it's difficult do you have a choice Asia, you're born to raise in Singapore you live in the UK why do you work? so I ended up in New York because originally my undergrad degree was in French psychology in the UK and in my final year actually my final year I've been going to audit classes audit major classes so I grew up in a primary school in that in my final year I also graduated I did audition for a place in the drama school I didn't go out to do a master's but I don't know training at all but it was a coincidence because of my undergrad college at that time had a sister relationship with the Pace University in Canada and they said hey, I've got a place in Massachusetts, London would you be willing to send me to New York for an exchange program just so I could get some formal training in New York and they said yes but six months in the city connections with the relative people and well I'm going to study theater instead of the trans and I'm not supposed to go to New York so I'm not here I was pretty much at it I want you you're from, originally from Lebanon why New York it's just an artist initially I moved to Texas with my family the vast distances and the way I could get out of my head and it was that I don't think part of it but New York was also very hustle and bustle and I think I found it familiar I made this choice thinking this is where I'm flying the most and I would definitely say I have even though it felt like the loneliest place I've ever lived it's the most diverse place I've ever lived so it's telling how are we in time? good we've been going on for quite a while so this is great I hope everybody got a lot out of today's talk and it just seems like in this world of instability and conflict all the more it's really necessary to have art the common language that is devoid of conflict to bring people together and so we need more international artists diversity is very important and thank you so much for making the effort to come here and stay here and create your work and art and share with everybody here in the world and I was going to say to add on to what you said about international artists I also think it's really important for in the city to be open to helping international artists because it's often talking when you just talk to regular Americans about this they're often so clueless about what's going on I mean I just worked on the language and the first thing they asked me was oh are you a word visa and then they asked me a bunch of really random documents that they didn't even need to employ me and you know I was one else here and the regular American just providing social security whatever and that's it but so many times I've encountered situations where people more than they actually require which is a really really annoying example because it's really annoying but yeah it's really important for companies anyone to to help organizations well thank you to all our panelists let's give them a hand thank you so much for organizing this and the tech people back there thank you so much and have you ever been able to comment today thank you