As you might have guessed, this site is focused on artist visas, also known as “celebrity visas” or “genius visas”. While most workers are set on obtaining their H1-B visas before numbers run out, the O-1 visa is often overlooked and misunderstood. BusinessWeek recently featured an excellent story about O1 visas.

O1 visas are awarded to immigrants with extraordinary abilities in the arts, sciences, education, business, or athletics. The program, for what are officially called O-1 visas, began in 1990 as lawmakers sought to separate these applicants from the pool of those seeking H-1B visas, the visa program for skilled immigrants used by many technology companies. While H-1B applicants must hold at least a bachelor’s degree and possess some specialized skill, O-1 visas are allotted to a more elite crowd: those who can prove to U.S. immigration officials that they are the very top in their fields.

Misunderstandings often occur when you read the immigration laws that apply. The codes make reference to a “Nobel Prize” equivalent. This is enough to scare off even the most qualified individuals. However, in practice USCIS takes careful note of the supporting evidence, recommendation letters and overall look of the application. This is often why artists are often successful in this O-1 visa applications when linked up with a good immigration lawyer or attorney. I will elaborate more on this in later postings.

To give you some recent numbers, according to the U.S. State Dept.—which makes the grants to successful applicants—9,014 O-1s were awarded in 2008, up 40% from 2004. Among current O-1 visa holders are Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki, Canadian author Jennifer Gould Keil, Israeli concert pianist Inon Barnatan, and members of the New York dance companies Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane. This gives you an idea as to the diverse specialties of the arts that incapsulate this “artist visa”. More to come…