Yasmine Benabdallah

Born and raised in Morocco, Yasmine Benabdallah is a filmmaker and visual artist who studied film and mathematics at Columbia University in New York before moving to Paris to attend the Experimental Programme in Political Arts at Sciences Po (SPEAP). She is currently in a critical praxis PhD in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, researching decolonial image-making methods.

Through film and multimedia installation work, Yasmine Benabdallah explores questions of memory, performance, diaspora, archives, rituals, and time travel. Lineage and storytellers are central to her art, our bodies and voices kindred history keepers. Her work is experiential and often grows through wandering and listening to bodies and spaces. Her family, Morocco, our histories, how our bodies are bound together and to our lands and oceans through rituals, how we keep record, and how we take care, are all central to the work she makes.

Friendship is also a great anchor, tenderness and care essential to how her work evolves. Her experimentations grow through conversations with friends who are curators, producers, artists, or filmmakers, whether they are at that time collaborating as part of artist collectives or simply providing support for each other’s projects.

Yasmine’s work has been shown in Morocco, France, Egypt, Germany, Portugal, the US, the UK, Palestine, and the UAE, where “How to reverse a spell: the promise of an archive” won the Sharjah Art Foundation Best Experimental Short award, in addition to residencies in Palestine, Morocco, France, Portugal, and Tunisia, where “Chebba” won the Cinephilia Best Screenplay Award.

She currently lives between Rabat and California.

Website of the artist