Founded in 1998, Tamizdat is an organization that facilitates international cultural exchange.
Tamizdat was founded by a group of musicians as a non-profit organization. It has been involved with a wide range of activities aimed at facilitating international cultural exchange… we have booked festival showcases in the US and Europe, organized tours, sponsored events, and for years we ran a CD distribution coalition. Early on, it became clear that US visa policy is one of the most significant obstacles to international cultural exchange, so we set out to change that by establishing a sympathetic and affordable artist-oriented visa service designed to help performing artists to navigate the US visa system. In 2009, in order to serve the needs of our commercial clients, we created Tamizdat Artists Services LLC, a for-profit company. Today, the two Tamizdats facilitate visas for nearly 6,000 performing artists each year.
In 2015, Tamizdat launched the Tamizdat “Artist Visa Assistance and Information Line”, or TamizdatAVAIL, to providing both short and long-term solutions to the increasingly thorny U.S. visa problems faced by the international performing arts community. TamizdatAVAIL is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and run in cooperation with New York Law School.