‘I found life’ — stateless, queer dancer makes San Diego — and the world — his home through ballet

He danced through the war, through statelessness and through the death and destruction of his dreams.

Today, Ahmad Joudeh is still dancing. 

The Syria-born dancer was denied citizenship in his country of birth because only his mother was Syrian, and in that country women don’t give their nationalities to their children. His father was a refugee from Palestine, which meant that even before Joudeh was born, he was marked for statelessness.

Today, he lives between San Diego and Amsterdam. But it took him a long time to get here.

Joudeh — a child of two educators — grew up in Syria’s Yarmouk camp, which was created in 1957 and housed a large Palestinian refugee population. He went to schools there that were maintained by the United Nations. 

“In these schools, we were very spoiled,” he said. “We had music, we had arts, we had English as a second language.” Yarmouk was more of a city than a camp. His family was cultured and well educated, with musical instruments serving as their toys. 

Joudeh discovered an early talent for singing and at age 8, ended up performing at an event in Damascus celebrating the end of the school year. While he was at the celebration, he saw something that changed his life forever: some of the girls had put on a student performance of Swan Lake. 

“When I saw it, I was mesmerized,” he said. It was his first inkling that music could be performed visually, with movement and dance, rather than with instruments or with a voice. He began to move the way he had seen the girls dancing, but alone in his room, fearful of being discovered.

A few years later, his voice changed and he pushed his singing voice so far that he injured his vocal cords. 

“And then I could just not sing any more,” he said. “And that made me just so depressed… I didn’t want to talk to anyone, my voice was taken from me, and I used to just, like, dance at my house with my door locked by myself.” The only Western music they had at home was by Enigma, so he would dance to that.

But then he found his lifeline in his great love, ballet. He auditioned for the Enana Dance Theater in Damascus, was accepted, and set off to train. “I found life, literally,” he said.

At first, he danced in secret, fearful of what his father would think. Then a performance he had done in Palmyra was televised. 

“He was watching the news and then there was a special after the news, and there was my face in full makeup,” said Joudeh. 

Their relationship immediately changed for the worse, punctuated by physical and emotional abuse. Then, Joudeh said, his father would offer him a binary choice — he could study, or he could dance. For Joudeh, the choice was easy.

“I would tell him I would dance or die,” he said.

The choice itself may have been easy, but living it was difficult. His mother left his father and took Joudeh along with her. His depression worsened. He attempted suicide.

Then the war began. It was 2011.

War and the stateless

Refugee camps were among the first hit in the Syrian civil war, which was sparked by its government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Yarmouk Camp was the scene of intense fighting.

“The government sent a car full of bombs,” Joudeh said. “We lived in the first main square of the street, so they took it as a checkpoint.”

Years of relentless attacks by forces loyal to former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on his own country ended up killing five members of Joudeh’s family.

“We left the camp because everything was bombed,” Joudeh said. “We only had what we were wearing.”

It was clear by now that Damascus was too dangerous, so his mother suggested that they move to Palmyra, where he had done his first televised performance not many years before. But Joudeh refused, because he had exams and he wanted to finish high school.

However, he was unable to qualify for housing aid from the state because, as someone born into statelessness, he was not considered a citizen. So for two and a half months, he lived in a tent on the roof of his best friend’s family home.

“I still have that tent,” he said. “It’s a symbol of resilience. Once you’re a refugee… you carry a tent with you.”

Living in that tent altered everything for Joudeh, yet again. This time, though, he decided it was time for him to change his circumstances.

“I have the same name as my grandfather. He also lived in a tent when he left Palestine,” he said he remembers thinking. “I’m still in the city I was born in and I’m still in a a tent in the cold.”

“So I thought, I need opportunities.”

Joudeh had already been targeted for death threats for his dancing by extremist operatives more than once from groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, who swept through Syria attacking and intimidating artists and writers. He was threatened and worse; on multiple occasions guns were held to his head. His queerness made him all the more vulnerable.

But still, he danced. There was no choice left to be made. He had already made it. He would dance, or he would die.

He felt that so deeply that he got the phrase “Dance or Die” tattooed across the back of his neck — right where the blade would fall should one of the extremists follow through on their threats to behead him.

In 2016, Dutch journalist Roozbeh Kabaly, drawn by videos of Joudeh’s rooftop dancing, captured documentary footage of Joudeh dancing in a half-destroyed ancient amphitheater in Palmyra, the place he first fell in love with ballet. The ruins had been most recently used as a site for mass executions. Joudeh’s dance, effectively reclaiming the space as a place for performing, went viral in 2016.

It also caught the attention of the Dutch National Ballet, which offered him a life-changing scholarship and led to something that was for him both infinitely precious and previously unimaginable: A nationality.

The ability to anchor himself to one country offered him unprecedented freedom of movement. Today, Joudeh divides his time between the Netherlands and San Diego, where he has a home in the Mission Valley area and dances with Golden State Ballet.

Statelessness, queerness, and the intersection of nationality and human rights

Ahmad Joudeh will never forget where he came from. He also has never forgotten where he wants to go.

His sexuality, just like his dancing, is an inseparable part of his sense of freedom, he says.

“My dance is very queer,” Joudeh said. “Being queer is, for me, being free… The freedom to love, the freedom to be ourself, the freedom worth fighting for.”

Today, his work encompasses not just dancing, but serving as an LGBTQ+ ambassador for the United Nations, advocating for the rights of refugees and the stateless — two related, yet distinct ways that people can be separated from their ability to access rights that are generally protected by national governments.

For those without a country to call home, queerness adds another complicated layer over an already-fraught existence that often has to be eked out on the margins of society.

His life story is also an opportunity to educate people about statelessness, said Suzanne Ehlers, the executive director of USA for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency.

“It’s so basic and yet it’s hard to wrap your brain around, because a stateless person is someone who is not considered a national of any state,” Ehlers said. She added that it causes a cascading effect that is very difficult to escape.

And citizenship is not guaranteed for life, either. In fact, statelessness can come for anyone at any time, whether through the dissolution of state borders, international disputes, or internal moves by national governments.

The monikers and methodologies may differ, but the results are the same: no country has duty of care, which means no driver’s license, no passport, no birth certificate, no state identification, and no recourse.

“It is beyond a persons control and it impacts every facet of their life and identity,” Ehlers said. “Every facet.”

Ehlers says an estimated ten million people are stateless globally — although the exact number is difficult to pinpoint, as without paperwork, there is no way to track their movements.

That is why Joudeh’s story is so important, she added. “He’s telling the story of generations born into a circumstance… how do we break that cycle? The piece of the story that is most exciting to me is if you can get people to care. It just breaks open possibilities for so many after him.”

The more awareness the public has of stateless people living within their borders, the more pressure they can put on their governments to offer pathways into a nationality.

“Putting pressure on governments to enact policies or regulatory frameworks for stateless people does happen in some contexts,” Ehlers said. “The issue of refugees is relatively well known — we understand that war or persecution displaces someone, and we don’t think it’s the refugees fault. The same dynamic is at play with statelessness.

“Maybe state borders have dissolved, literally while families are traveling, and then they come home and are not recognized.”

Without a national identity, all stateless people have to offer is their own humanity. But without visibility, there is little to be leveraged.

This issue has become even more fraught in the United States, where the Fourteenth Amendment has been on the radar of the Trump administration and its allies. Birthright citizenship is a right that many Americans take for granted.

“The Constitution and the birthright process is so great,” said Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough, the executive director of United Stateless, a group that — as its name implies — advocates for the rights of stateless people within the United States. “Americans don’t realize that the right to nationality is not inherent.”

Ambartsoumian-Clough formed the organization in order to help connect people like her. Like Joudeh, she was stateless. Unlike him, she wasn’t born into statelessness. She lost her citizenship as a child when the Soviet Union dissolved.

The family fled to the United States, where the vagaries and changes around American immigration laws caught them in a vicious double bind.

“I was 13 years old when our final claim to asylum was denied,” she said. “And we were told to leave — to self deport.”

But because they were now stateless, there was nowhere to deport them to, and no way for the family to obtain travel documents in any case, and so they stayed. Her father died two years ago, still stateless.

But there are political solutions, at least domestically, to the invisible, nearly intractable problem — if legislators have the will to make it happen.

“There’s openings there, it’s just now there’s no appetite for any of this,” she said. “The majority of stateless people, I think like 80 percent of our clients, need Congress to pass the pass the Stateless Protection Act to get us protection,” she said. “Stateless people fall out of any migrant protection because they are stateless.”

It is even possible to be born in the United States and still be stateless.

“There are people in America whose parents chose not to register their births, and they grew up as unregistered Americans,” she said.

The road ahead

In addition to his ballet and choreography work, Ahmad Joudeh, now 36 and a resident of both San Diego and Amsterdam, travels the world advocating for asylum-seekers, refugees, and stateless people.

I would just make sure to write it correctly by the end ( an ambassador for pride Amsterdam – and a high profile supporter for the UNHCR United Nations, also a young global leader and a cultural leader at the world economic forum)

He also works to increase visibility for queer people, serving as an ambassador for Pride Amsterdam, as well as a High Profile Supporter with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an International Friend of SOS Children’s Villages International, and a Young Global Leader and a Cultural Leader with the World Economic Forum.

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Joudeh said the arts — including music, literature, and dance — have offered him a way to survive abuse, terror, displacement, and war. He still suffers the effects of a life filled with trauma. “I have my nightmares I have my challenges,” he said.

His life is not an easy one, but he says he doesn’t believe anybody’s life is ever truly easy. What he believes in, what sustains him, is joy.

“Connecting to the divine and feeling divine is no passport,” he said. “It’s no country. It’s within you…. Allow yourself to live your freedom, because when you become a free person you will allow others to be free too.”