Yasmine Hassen

Yasmine Hassen’s maternal lineage is Afro-Caribbean of the island of St. Kitts, and was impacted by the trans-atlantic slave trade, historically-likely to have been taken from Sengal, West Africa. Their paternal lineage is of the Oromo peoples (Arsi Clan) who are an Indigenous ethnic group within Ethiopia. As a queer-nonbinary, Black diasporic person born in tkaronto, Yas lives and creates on the stolen land of Turtle Island; on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Wendake-Nionwentsïo, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation – which has been the meeting place and land of Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island since time immemorial.  They honour and are in reciprocity with their ancestors and acknowledge that Turtle Island was never meant to be owned and the llasting legacy of the trans atlantic slave trade, and that no one is ever meant to be owned. We are acting to divest from the Euro-Expansionist global project of anti-Blackness. 

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Their practice is rooted in trauma-informed somatic modalities as ways to tangibly decolonize the body in pursuit of restorative healing and decarceral accountability. Within their community work, they are invested in decentralizing political education by supporting the exchange of community and cultural knowledges within the tradition of Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty and anti-poverty. As a mover and maker, they use multi-sensorial mediums as a way to tell stories that centre spacializing grief and joy, ecologies of care, resistance and belonging.