Safe Haven Incubator for Musicians: NYC
“SHIM:NYC”is a 12-month creative and professional residency and mentorship program for international musicians who are persecuted or censored for their work; are threatened on the basis of their political or religious affiliations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity; have been forcibly displaced; need a respite from dangerous situations; or are from countries experiencing active, violent conflict.
SHIM:NYC matches resident musicians with carefully selected mentors, to provide artists with an opportunity to develop a specific work, hone their skills, and expand their professional network. While at-risk artist residency programs have done hugely positive work for writers, journalists, and visual artists, they have historically struggled to serve the needs of musicians whose craft is often very reliant on local and regional networks of industry professionals. SHIM:NYC is conceived as a pilot program, designed to explore strategies for conducting residency programs for relocated musicians. The project is spearheaded by Tamizdat and The Artistic Freedom Initiative, in collaboration with Westbeth Artist Housing, NYC Artist Safe Haven Residency Program. and The Public Theater New York Voices commissioning program, which provides the support of this world class institution. SHIM:NYC is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. For more information about SHIM NYC, or its founding partners Artistic Freedom Initiative, Tamizdat, and Westbeth Artist Housing: shimnyc@tamizdat.org.
2024 Artist in Residence: Firas Zreik
Artist-composer, lyricist and educator Firas Zreik has performed and recorded across the world as a leader and highly sought collaborator since 2013. A sonic revolutionary, the Palestine-born New Yorker has transformed global perception of the Kanun. His treatment of the instrument preserves its identity as a vital part of the Maqam tradition, and stretches its potential as a cultural chameleon enhancing a range of fresh, evolving sounds. He views the Maqam’s improvisation-driven legacy as a vessel for unbound creative expression across musical styles.
Zreik’s music is honest and authentic. His nuanced approach translates the kanun’s resonant depth of emotion, with a mastery of microtonal soundscaping. Comfortable in both heavily orchestrated and spontaneous settings, he creates waves of layered expression and lyricism among his fellow artists. Over the years, he has collaborated with a cross section of leaders, including Roger Waters, G.E. Smith, Residente, Simon Shaheen, Amir ElSaffar, Fabrizio Cassol, Marwan Khoury, Abeer Nehmeh, Elias Karam, Walid Tawfik, Mohammed Mohsen, Shreya Goshal, Shankar Mahadevan, Aynur Dogan, and his internationally-renowned mother and frequent artistic partner Amal Murkus, for whom he serves as musical director.
In live performance, Zreik conjures a complexity of emotion that shapeshifts throughout his sets. He enters fragile places and sits inside them. This commitment to stark exploration has sent him around the world, performing at storied venues, intimate clubs and international festivals. He has appeared at WOMEX international music expo, Smithsonian Museum, Savannah Music Festival, Tunisia’s Carthage International Festival and Hill Auditorium, as well as The Jazz Gallery, Lincoln Center and Historic Greenwood in New York City; Boston Symphony Hall and Berklee Performance Center in Boston; Institute du Monde Arabe and La Bellevilloise in Paris; Palais de Congres in Belgium; and Teatro Mediterraneo in Italy.
Before leaving Boston for New York in 2020, Zreik received his Bachelor of Arts in Music from Berklee College of Music — where he received a full presidential scholarship — completing a double major in Performance and Jazz Composition and appearing on the Dean’s List eight times. He has received global recognition for his artistry as a member of the Medinea Network and participant in the 2013 Beit Al-Musica Guildhall Exchange program in London and the Intercultural Session in both Aix En Provence and Sardinia, Italy in 2017 and 2019, respectively. In 2019, Zreik received coveted placement at the Blue Mountain Center Residency where he served as Artist-in-Residence. Recently, Zreik was chosen as the sole musician for inclusion on the Arab America Foundation’s 30 Under 30 list. In 2020, “Lullaby for Nature” received praise from Makan Radio as Instrumental Piece of the Year.
Zreik credits his spirit of experimentation, in part, to the dedicated instructors who have guided his artistry, including Mahran Moreb, Simon Shaheen, Greg Hopkins, Manuel Kauffmann, Ed Tomassi, Fabrizio Cassol, Bob Pilkington, Eugene Frissen, Leo Blanco and Alain Mallett. A consummate educator himself, Zreik has taught at the Arabic Music Retreat in Western Massachusetts and Circle World Arts in Brooklyn, and delivered workshops at NYU Abu Dhabi, Tufts and Berklee. He has been offering private Kanun lessons to an international community of talented artists since 2020.
Former SHIM:NYC residents:
Lama El Homaïssi, she/her, (SHIM:NYC Resident for 2022-23) is a Lebanese performer, writer and voiceover artist currently based in New York City where she is the 2022 SHIM:NYC artist-in-residence.
Lama started her career in entertainment working for years as a television writer in Lebanon, creating original shows for the Sony Pictures Television Arabia and Talpa Middle East catalogs, developing commissions for clients, as well as adapting productions to the SWANA region (most notably The Voice and So You Think You Can Dance).
In 2017, Lama pursued her MFA in Musical Theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee where she honed her skills in acting and storytelling through song, then began developing and performing her own work for the stage. Her capstone project Article 534 was a play about queer identity, resistance and safe havens in Beirut that combined storytelling with music. The project is titled after the archaic article in the Lebanese penal code that criminalizes the LGBTQIA+ community, deeming queer relations “contrary to the order of nature” to this day.
While in Boston, Lama served as a dramaturgy assistant on Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s We Live in Cairo, a new musical about the 2011 Egyptian uprising that premiered at American Repertory Theater in 2019. She contributed Arabic lyrics to the song “Tahrir Is Now” on the Lazour brothers’ album Flap My Wings: Songs from We Live in Cairo, released in 2020. Lama later went on to work as a Dramaturgy and Publications Assistant for A.R.T.’s 2019-2020 season and was involved as a storyteller and singer in several community engagement and education events in both Boston and New York City.
As part of her SHIM:NYC residency, Lama is writing and developing a new play with music, Missing (working title), which is a story of diaspora, coping with loss, and a generational gift that comes calling.
Venues Lama has performed at include Club OBERON, Joe’s Pub, Berklee Performance Center, and Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium and Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse. Lama’s writing has also been featured in the Brooklyn Rail and in her essay on Storytelling as an Act of Survival has been published in HowlRound Theatre Commons.
For more, visit: lama-elhomaissi.com*
*website currently under construction
Haig Papazian, (SHIM:NYC Resident for 2021) is a Lebanese Armenian artist, composer, and architect born in Beirut. He is a founding member and violinist of Mashrou’ Leila, the Lebanese pop band whose electro-pop anthems about political freedoms, race, and modern Arabic identity have challenged the status quo of the Middle-Eastern music industry. An architect by training, Haig has participated in the inaugural edition of the Home Workspace program in Beirut, and has completed his graduate studies in Architectural history at the Bartlett school of Architecture in London. Papazian’s visual work, which explores the intersections between city-making processes, cultural productions and undocumented historical narratives, has been shown in Sharjah at SB11 March Meeting 2013, at Homeworks 6 in Beirut, Videonale15 in Germany, and at Gallery Kit in Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway.
Alongside Mashrou’ Leila, Haig has performed at sold out venues and festivals across the Arab region, Europe, and North America. He’s been an artist in residence at NYU; has campaigned with Greenpeace in an initiative to promote solar energy across the Mediterranean, and has participated in the BLOCK 9 & BANKSY Creative Retreat alongside Brian Eno, Roisin Murphy and more. He has held public talks at NYU, Columbia University, Concordia, Darmouth College, Sciences Po, and has recently performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra. Haig has recently published an op-Ed in the New York Times on “The Cost of being Queer and Arab” and for France Culture, a love letter in the form of an essay to “Beyrouth et Beyrouth, travail en cours/Beirut and Beirut: work in progress”.
Mai Khoi, (SHIM:NYC Resident for 2020) a musician and composer, rose to stardom in Vietnam in 2010 after winning the Vietnam Television song and album of the year awards. With her stardom, however, came increasing discomfort with government censorship, and an ever-increasing desire to write and perform songs that reflected her experiences in an authoritarian country. Aiming to reform the system from within, Mai Khoi nominated herself to run in the National Assembly elections on a pro-democracy platform. Her unprecedented campaign sparked a nationwide debate about political participation and culminated in a meeting with Barack Obama in May 2016 during his state visit to Vietnam. Shortly after, Mai Khoi started the avant-garde dissident trio Mai Khoi Chém Gió (“Mai Khoi and the Dissidents”) and the group released their debut album “Dissent” in 2018. Working at the intersection of art and activism, Mai Khoi has developed her most personal musical style to date. Her new sound is an emotionally-charged fusion of free jazz and ethnic Vietnamese music, with her most political, yet personal, song lyrics ever. Mai Khoi has leds efforts to promote freedom of artistic expression in Vietnam for which she was awarded the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent. Her activism has, however, come at a high price, and severely impacted her life in Vietnam. She has had her concerts raided, been evicted from her house, been detained and interrogated by the police, and, since the November 2019 world premiere of the documentary “Mai Khoi and the Dissidents” at DocNYC, been unable to return to her home in Hanoi. Mai Khoi will be spending the three months of her SHIM NYC residency developing an autobiographical song cycle titled “Bad Activist”.
King Raam (SHIM:NYC resident, autumn 2019) is an Iranian musician, storyteller, and actor. He started his performing career as the singer/songwriter/founder of Hypernova, a post-punk band born in the undergrounds of Tehran in the early 2000’s. After touring worldwide with Hypernova, Raam began pursuing a solo career under the name of King Raam, acting in film and theater, and developing his solo show “Departure”, a work-in-progress. In January 2018, Raam’s father, Kavous Seyed Emami, an Iranian/Canadian environmentalist, was arrested in Tehran under false charges of espionage. Two weeks later he was killed in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. When Raam’s family attempted to flee, Raam and his brother could leave, but their mother was held hostage in Iran for 582 days. In “Departure,” Raam tells the story of his family’s experience and his father’s legacy, woven together with his music. (Developed during Raam’s Safe Havens Incubator for Musicians (SHIM NYC) residency, a new residency program for at-risk musicians created by Artistic Freedom Initiative and Tamizdat.) Unable to return to Iran, and after several years of adventures between Toronto, Vancouver, London, Los Angeles, and Berlin, Raam moved back to NYC to begin the next chapter of his creative life. www.kingraam.com