Faculty Staff Co-Founders
PRODUCTIONS CURRENT PAST
 

Refugees + Resettlement in the United States

 
CFR Event Screengrab - 1.png
 

DATE

February 29, 2024

LOCATION

Harold Pratt House,

Council on Foreign Relations

Commissioned World Premiere

 

CREATED AND DIRECTED BY:

Lee Sunday Evans
 

PART I WRITTEN BY:

Damon Owlia and Lee Sunday Evans

PART II DEVELOPED BY:

Lee Sunday Evans


 

Our deepest gratitude to Chris George, former Executive Director of IRIS who contributed invaluable perspective to the development of this project based on his decades of remarkable leadership in this arena. We would also like to thank the Community Sponsorship Hub, which helped create WelcomeCorps materials for this project.

 

Waterwell was commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations to create an original, site-specific project about global migration to be performed in their historic building. Waterwell created an  experiential performance project that highlighted key policy questions about how gender-based asylum law currently impacts the overseas refugee vetting process, and highlighted WelcomeCorps, a new State Department program that is revolutionizing the way that refugees can be identified and resettled in the U.S., paving the way for a bright new future where we can welcome more newcomers to our country. These two parts of the performance opened up fertile ground for a robust panel conversation with leading thinkers in the field: David Milliband - President of the International Rescue Committee, Gregory Maniatis - who leads the work on migration and refugees at the Open Society Foundations, and Shannon K. O'Neil who is the Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Read more below and watch this remarkable video to learn more about this innovative and deeply emotional event.

THE SHOW

  • Setting: Tegucigalpa, Honduras. 2022.

    The audience sat in the round to watch a re-enactment of an in-country interview between a Honduran woman applying for refugee status in the United States and a U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) officer. The interview is one of the final steps in the process of being granted refugee protection and access to resettlement in the United States. The script portrayed a fictionalized account, drawn from true stories of asylum seekers from Honduras, and was developed by artists at Waterwell in close collaboration with former USRAP personnel and experts on refugee law.

  • The audience then broke up into small groups around the CFR building and participated in small group meetings led by actors playing the role of Welcome Corps volunteers who were introducing this a new State Department program that has created a framework for regular people to welcome new refugees through community sponsorship groups.

  • Those two performance events were followed by a robust panel discussion on factors driving global migration and the ways in which initiatives like Welcome Corps and other solutions are changing the landscape of resettlement and immigration policy in the United States.

  • Actors

    Salome Egas (G., Honduran refugee)

    Jason Butler Harner (USRAP officer)

    Welcome Corps Volunteer

    Kathleen Chalfant

    Alex Correia

    Danielle Davenport

    Meghan Finn

    Enid Graham

    Daoud Hedami

    Ryan Kim

    Sharina Martin

    Marjan Neshat

    Polly Noonan

    Melle Powers

    David Shih

  • Speakers

    Gregory Maniatis

    David Miliband

    Shannon K. O'Neil

    Presider

    Elmira Bayrasli