For the next two months, New Yorkers will have plenty of chances to show-up fashionably late for one of the activations at the third annual New York Arab Festival — but they won’t want to miss a thing.

The NYC-based festival, which runs April 7 to May 30 (with pre-festival events on April 5 and 6), has a curated program full of talks, performances, and artists amplifying all things Arab in the City That Never Sleeps.

The festival was established in 2022 to “celebrate Arab-American Heritage Month and fight the erasure of Arab and Arab-American identities from New York City — a place that Arabs have called home for over three centuries,” the organizers of NYAF said in a statement to Arab News.

During its first year, the festival was mostly clustered within the island of Manhattan, but has since spread across the boroughs, and even upstate. 

It is the brainchild of two co-founders: Egyptian artistic director, Adham Hafez, who resides in New York; Adam Kucharski, an American who has called Saudi Arabia home for the last six years — he has curated a program for the festival called Raseef (which translates to sidewalk) dedicated to art, architecture and urbanism. New York- and Japan-based creative, Cindy Sibilsky, the senior producer with bright hair and an even brighter smile, was also part of the founding team.

“Every month there is a celebration in the US dedicated to a particular group of people or to a particular culture,” Hafez told Arab News. “I just truly didn’t understand why, when April is there — the month was dedicated to Arab and Arab-American heritage — institutions just go quiet.”

Hafez and his co-founders, alongside a small core team, decided to turn the spotlight on the people, places and faces that they felt best represent