New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), founded in 1971, empowers artists at critical stages of their creative lives. One of the ways NYFA serves our mission is through our Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (IAP) that has served more than 460 mentees since 2007. A large part of the success of this program is the fostering of communities and networks that enables participants and consultants to connect and collaborate to create more opportunities for artists to showcase their work and push their practice to new levels. A clear example of this is a recent NYFA/New York Live Arts (NYLA) collaboration initiated by Yanira Castro, a Puerto Rican, Bessie Award-winning artist based in Brooklyn, and Martita Abril, a performer, choreographer, teaching artist, and mentor of the IAP Program. With the goal of reflecting on the multiplicity of their experiences, identities, practices, and politics, these artists also speak to what holds them in common: the experience of displacement and disorientation, and the work of communicating/finding/forming community.
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