January 2022 AIR Event
Navigating Visas in Creative Fields
Artist Talk with Guanyu Xu with art critic Darshita Jain, Attorney
Linda Ge Lei, and Case Manager Aurora Chou
Artist Talk with Guanyu Xu with art critic Darshita Jain, Attorney Linda Ge Lei, and Case Manager Aurora Chou
Friday, March 25th from 6 PM on Zoom
Join us on Friday, March 25th at 6 pm CST for a Zoom conversation with our January Artist in Residence, Guanyu Xu. Guanyu is a Chicago artist who has gone through the process of attaining an art degree as an international student and an artist visa to be able to work as a teacher. During this event, Guanyu will be accompanied by art critic Darshita Jain, Attorney Linda Ge Lei, and Case Manager Aurora Chou who will also share their experiences navigating the immigration visa process.
Guanyu Xu
徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago and a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Influenced by the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China, Xu’s practice extends from examining the production of power in photography to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. He negotiates this from the perspective as a Chinese gay man. In his work, Xu migrates between mediums like photography, new media, and installation. These movements operate similarly to his displaced and fractured identity.
He is the winner of the CENTER Development Grant (2021), Hyéres International Festival Prize (2020), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Annual Competition (2019), and Kodak Film Photo Award (2019). His works have been exhibited and screened internationally including International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orlean Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Mint Museum, Charlotte; 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others. His works have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, ArtAsiaPacific, The New Yorker, and Dazed China
Panelist BioS:
Attorney Linda Ge Lei: Partner & Co-founder of Getech Law
Ms. Lei is the co-founder of Getech Law LLC, a well-known Chicago - based Boutique Law firm with offices across China and the U.S.. Linda has a broad and diverse range of both practical and legal experience. She has extensive experience in Intellectual Property, Business Immigration, and Business/Corporate Law.
Ms. Lei leads a team in obtaining employment-based immigration benefits for both giant corporates with 10,000+ employees and start- up companies with few employees , such as nonimmigrant visa classification (H-1B, O-1, L-1, and E-2); permanent residence or “green card” status through Labor Certification or as immigrants of Exceptional or Extraordinary Ability (EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3); investment-based immigration (EB-5).Over the past few years, Ms. Lei’s team has accumulated 1,000 + H-1B approvals, 500+ O-1 approvals, and 100 +Green Card approvals. Ms. Lei has also been involved with thousands of trademark/copyright prosecutions, disputes/litigations, IP licensing agreement and all sorts of other IP related and commercial agreements.
Additionally, Linda assists public and private companies in their corporate transactions. Her experience includes representation of issuers of securities in connection with both public and private offerings of equity securities in the U.S, including the public offerings of special purposes acquisition companies (SPACs), Regulation D, Regulation S, and Regulation A offerings.
Aurora Chou : Manager of Immigration Department of Getech Law
Ms. Chou is the Manager of Immigration Department of Getech Law LLC, she has worked for a couple of law firms before joining Getech Law in 2019. She has accumulated over 10 years' experience in immigration visa service, and assisted with almost 5,000 immigration cases of various categories. Ms. Chou specializes in student visa, OPT, CPT, H-1B working visas, O-1B artist visa, and EB-1A extraordinary green card. When she was in graduate school, Ms. Chou has served as a volunteer translator at the USCIS office in Long Island, NY. Also, she worked for DSO in the International Student Office at the St. John's University helping with student visas and work authorizations. Ms. Chou was also a traditional Chinese claborate-style painter. She got her first Gold Medal in Chinese national art competition when she was nine years old. All these past experiences helped her acquire handful knowledge to meet the needs of different kinds of visas and greencards.
Ms. Chou is enthusiastic about public welfare. She has been participating in International Volunteer Program since 2009. Ms. Chou was a representative for Asian district by the non-government non-profit organization International Fund for Economic Development (IFED). She has volunteered for nonprofit art projects in Cambodia and Thailand. She was also an IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program participant for a few years. In 2016, Aurora initiated her own charity trip and visited Kenya in support of local orphanage education project.
Darshita Jain Programming Lead at Woman Made Gallery
Darshita Jain is an art critic, poet and organiser. She holds an MA in New Arts Journalism from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (May, 2022) Born and raised in a family of educators in India, she studied fashion design and marketing in her past life. Co-founder of Povera, one of the first spoken word collectives in the city of Ahmedabad, India Darshita has been writing and developing tools to educate and build a critical lens to life and culture for the last 8 years.
She is currently the Programming Lead at Woman Made Gallery, Chicago where she is building inclusive, intersectional exhibitions and public programs for the gallery.