Born and raised in Morocco, Yasmine Benabdallah is a filmmaker, visual artist, and researcher, whose work explores memory, performance, diaspora, archives, rituals, and time travel. Her work is experiential and grows through wandering and listening to bodies and spaces. It is rooted in our histories, how our bodies are bound together and to lands and oceans through rituals, and how we take care. Her experimentations expand through conversations with friends, whether they are at that time collaborating on a project or providing support for each other’s.
Her films and installations have been shown in Morocco, France, Egypt, Canada, Palestine, Tunisia, Germany, Lebanon, Portugal, the US, Scotland, England, and the UAE, where “How to reverse a spell: the promise of an archive” won the Sharjah Art Foundation Best Experimental Short award. Yasmine has done residencies in Palestine, Morocco, France, Portugal, and Tunisia, where “Chebba” received the Cinephilia Best Screenplay Award at the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC). Her writing has been published in MAI: peer-reviewed journal on Feminism & Visual Culture, African Studies Review, Klima Magazine, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2020 Catalogue, Middle East Eye, divine zine, and HuffPost Maghreb.
Yasmine has a BA in Film and Mathematics from Columbia University and an MA from the Experimental Programme in Political Arts at Sciences Po (SPEAP). She is currently pursuing a critical praxis PhD in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz researching the intersection of decolonial moving-image making, rituals, and archives. Her dissertation project is temporarily titled “‘The one with the manes’: Relating archives, rituality, and ocean worldviews through decolonial moving-image practices and translocal conversations in Morocco and Brazil.”