We want to thank everyone who attended and sponsored our third annual New York Arab-American Comedy Festival. Your support made this year's Festival are most successful to date.

We especially want to thank the Arab-American community for its truly amazing assistance and patronage. The support of our community not only enables us to produce our Festival, it personally makes us very proud and inspires us as artists.

The support of both the Arab-American community and the general public made it possible for our Festival to grow from its first year in 2003, which consisted of only three live performances and which was attended by approximately four hundred people, to this year, which featured five nights of events with seven live performances and which was attended by over one thousand people.

One of our Festival's primary goals has always been to attract positive media coverage for the Arab-American community and the artists involved. This year we were very fortunate to receive extensive positive media exposure both nationally and internationally. Our Festival was featured in television and radio segments on CNN's "American Morning," CNN International, the nationally syndicated radio shows "Democracy Now" and NPR's "The World," BBC World radio (Arabic edition), 1010 WINS radio, and cable's NY1.

Our Festival was also featured in numerous newspaper articles including an Associated Press article and an Agence France Presse article which were reprinted in over 70 newspapers worldwide. Articles about our Festival appeared in USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, New York Newsday, The New Jersey Star Ledger, Beirut's Daily Star, and in papers from North Carolina to Asia, from New Mexico to Canada, and from Florida to Dubai. There was even an editorial praising our Festival written by the editors of a major newspaper in Kansas (yes, Kansas!)

�We are now planning to produce a short run of the Festival in Los Angeles in late January. Our goal is to create a showcase for the talented Arab-American actors, writers and stand up comics who have appeared in our Festival so that they can be seen by Hollywood casting agents and entertainment executives. We believe that the sooner more Arab-Americans are involved in the entertainment industry, the more effective we can be at encouraging Hollywood to begin portraying us accurately.

We once again thank you for your support and hope that you will attend our fourth annual Festival next fall. In the interim, we encourage every Arab-American who has ever thought about writing comedy, making comedic films, or trying acting or stand up comedy, to start doing so immediately. We want even more new people involved in next year's Festival!

Dean Obeidallah
Co-Founder and Co-Executive Producer

Maysoon Zayid
Co-Founder and Co-Executive Producer

Waleed Zuaiter
Co-Executive Producer