In 1998, a group of musicians founded Tamizdat as a tax-exempt non-profit with the mission of facilitating international cultural exchange. Tamizdat has been involved with a wide range of activities. We have booked festival showcases in the US and Europe, organized tours, sponsored events, and for years ran a CD distribution coalition. Early on, 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. Starting in 2013, in collaboration with CWA Management, Tamizdat will offer a US Tax Compliance program to serve the needs of foreign performing artists in the US.Here at Tamizdat, we all work closely together. Matthew Covey, Brian Steele, Madeline Gomez, Will Lulofs, Harlan Levine, Paulina Mandeville, and Amanda Willis Gupta will all have a hand in helping you. Each of us have different specialties, so don’t be worried if you write to one of us, and someone else responds. This is how we make sure we can best serve your needs as efficiently as possible.

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.