From the outside, obtaining an artist visa to the United States can appear like a black-box process: applications go in, decisions come out. And even to insiders, the fiercely bureaucratic system can seemingly yield unpredictable results. But the visa is of course not unattainable — it just requires talent, and the paperwork to back it up.
An artist visa, also called an O1B, is issued by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, and is granted to those with “extraordinary ability or achievement.” To parse what that means and get some tips on the process, ARTINFO spoke to immigration lawyer BoBi Ahn of Warshaw Burstein, LLP.