Lama’s performance is presented as a part of AFI’s BEAUTIFUL FORMS: QUEER ART UNBOUND, a three day arts festival dedicated to the celebration of the extraordinary queer artists and fierce allies who are fundamental to the fight for artistic freedom worldwide. It honors the many diverse and beautiful forms queer identities, art, and allyship can take and champions the rights to create, move, live, and love freely – unbound and without fear. 

Lama El Homaïssi is a Lebanese trilingual actor-singer, writer, and voiceover artist currently based in New York City. She is an artist in residence with SHIM:NYC and a member of the Joe’s Pub Working Group 2022-2023.  Lama is passionate about new works and amplifying underrepresented voices. As a SHIM:NYC resident, Lama has developed Not Harem Material and an original rock musical entitled Radio Beirut. 

Lama has previously performed at Lincoln Center (David Rubenstein Atrium and Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse), Club OBERON, Berklee Performance Center, WAM Theatre, Northampton Center for the Arts, The Foundry, foolsFURY, and Metro Al Madina. Her writing has been featured in The Harvard Gazette, The Brooklyn Rail, and HowlRound Theatre Commons.

Lama returns to Joe’s Pub with an incendiary debut of her solo cabaret: Not Harem Material, in which she weaves storytelling and music to immerse audiences in a multisensory chronicle of her experiences as a Lebanese, immigrant actor in the United States. Delivering a performance that is provocative, funny, and touching, Lama reflects on notions of identity, authenticity, and home all while playfully confronting monolithic Middle Eastern tropes in Western media. Don’t miss this, NYC!

BEAUTIFUL FORMS: QUEER ART UNBOUND is made possible with support from the SDK Foundation for Human Dignity, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature