who is yasmina?

Yasmina Seifeddine is a community organizer and visual artist who belongs to the Lebanese diaspora. She recently completed her undergraduate degree in Human Geography and Middle East Studies in so-called Vancouver, Canada as an uninvited guest and diasporic settler on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) lands. She is currently completing a master’s program in Building and Urban Design in Development at the Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit (DPU) at University College London (UCL).

Yasmina primarily works on hand-drawn and oil paint portraiture, and mixed media collages to convey messages relating to justice, world-(un)making, and Middle Eastern communities. Otherwise, Yasmina enjoys water-based mediums and fine-line penwork, and in her free time, she experiments with ceramics and printmaking.

Being largely inspired by a framework of critical hope, and hope as a praxis, Yasmina believes in creating work with intention and vocation. Today we are watching the world be ravaged by insipid imperial architecture and capitalist motives. Having learnt so much from the wise words and radical lenses of many great academics, knowledge keepers, and BIPOC/Southern feminists, Yasmina hopes to create work with and for the communities who are stewarding movements in the name of liberation, spatial justice and care-oriented worlds.

Currently, Yasmina is recalibrating the theses of her work, including working towards creating art that can help “make the revolution irresistible” (drawn from the amazing writing of Ismatu Gwendolyn, who quotes this idea from the phenomenal Toni Cade Bambara) and interrogating what it means to tangibly manifest and design for (spatial, economic, ecosystem, healing) justice. As a result of working on Maktabat el-Yasmin, Yasmina is also currently using her mater’s dissertation to explore the potential of archival praxis as cultivating decolonial trajectories in ongoing and multimedia works.

See Yasmina’s full CV here.