Asylum Speaker Story Night: Listening to Iranian Voices

About the Event

Asylum Speaker Story Nights is a national UNAA Young Professionals program inviting audiences across Australia to sit down and listen — truly listen — to the lived experiences of asylum seekers and refugees.

Through storytelling, conversation, and cultural exchange, the series seeks to humanise migration, build empathy, and create space for reflection, understanding, and community connection.

For this Asylum Speaker Story Night, UNAA Young Professionals Queensland will host Saina Avesta for an intimate conversation titled:

Listening to Iranian Voices: An LGBTQIA+ Journey of Identity and Freedom

Saina’s story follows her journey as a trans woman from Iran, where identity was shaped by fear, silence, and survival, through years of displacement in Turkey, and eventually to rebuilding her life in Australia.

Her reflections will explore the experience of navigating multiple layers of marginalisation — as a queer person, as a refugee, and as someone constantly negotiating safety within systems not designed to hold her. At its heart, this is a story about survival, dignity, resilience, and the ongoing search for belonging.

Purpose

The narrative around asylum, migration, and displacement too often excludes the voices of those who live these experiences.

This event creates space for lived experience to be heard with care, respect, and depth. Through Saina’s story, audiences will reflect on the realities faced by LGBTIQA+ people in forced migration, including questions of identity, disclosure, safety, trust, and belonging.

While Saina’s journey is shaped by displacement and marginalisation, it is also defined by courage, leadership, community care, and transformation. The evening seeks to challenge misconception and indifference by creating a space for dialogue, compassion, and understanding.

What to Expect

The event will take the form of an intimate fireside conversation, where Saina Avesta will speak with a UNAA YP Queensland team member about her lived experience as a trans woman, refugee, advocate, and community leader.

Through guided storytelling, the conversation will explore themes of identity, fear, survival, displacement, resilience, dignity, freedom, and belonging. Saina will also reflect on what these experiences reveal about the broader systems shaping the lives of LGBTIQA+ people in forced migration.

The evening will include Persian cultural elements woven into the storytelling, including the poem “Bani Adam” by Saadi Shirazi, which reflects on human interconnectedness and empathy, and the story of the Simorgh from Persian literature, symbolising collective identity, transformation, and strength through community.

Following the conversation, audience members will be invited to share reflections or ask questions, fostering thoughtful exchange and mutual understanding.

Supporting the Persian Queer Network through your ticket

As part of the evening, Saina will also share her current work with the Persian Queer Network, a volunteer-led initiative supporting Persian-speaking queer refugees and asylum seekers, particularly those in transit countries such as Turkey. All proceeds from this event will directly support the Persian Queer Network.

The network currently supports around 70 community members living in prolonged uncertainty, often without stable access to safety, services, or support systems.

Through peer support, online community sessions, practical information, advocacy, and limited direct financial assistance, the Persian Queer Network works to support people navigating urgent protection needs and difficult resettlement pathways.

Attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about this community-led work and how they can support its continuation.

About Saina Avesta

Saina Avesta is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Avesta Advisory, an independent consultancy focused on strengthening safe and accountable practice for organisations working with LGBTIQA+ people from refugee and multicultural backgrounds.

Her work supports organisations and frontline staff to better understand and respond to complex situations involving identity, disclosure, safety, and trust, translating lived experience into practical service delivery.

Alongside her consultancy, Saina’s work has been grounded in community leadership and advocacy, including her previous role as a peer leader with Third Queer Culture and her involvement in international advocacy spaces such as the Global Refugee Forum, where she has contributed to amplifying the voices of queer refugees.

Today, Saina continues to advocate for queer refugees, trans people, and LGBTIQA+ communities navigating forced migration, with a focus on safety, dignity, inclusion, and community-led support.

Event Details

Date: 26 May 2026
Doors open: 6:00 PM
Event starts: 6:15 PM
Location: Griffith Southbank Lecture Theatre

We look forward to welcoming you for an evening of powerful storytelling, cultural reflection, and community connection.