Yara Costa Mentorship Awards recipient

Yara Costa is an artist, filmmaker, and storyteller based in Mozambique. Yara’s work is deeply rooted in African narratives, storytelling, systems of knowledge, and human existence that due to intellectual racism, cultural genocide, colonialism and white supremacy have been persistently invisibilised. She is the founder of YC Creative Platform, which combines different forms of storytelling, art, multimedia, and immersive technologies on themes such as Swahili coastal cultural heritage, identity and cultural genocide, and ecology, while training young people in artistic and cultural projects.

Employing a variety of mediums such as film, podcast, spatial audio, VR/XR, and immersive exhibition experiences, Yara wants to create engaged and socially transformative artistic and cultural interventions alerting for the urgent need to refocus on local oral traditions, seeking shared solutions to some of the most significant challenges we are all currently faced with. She actively involves the communities in these efforts, fostering micro-transformative changes that contribute to local resilience and positive self-affirmation. Additionally, her practice delves into contemplations regarding contemporary Africa and the diaspora, primarily through storytelling. She endeavors to share her vision of the world by harnessing new modern technologies blending with technology in traditional African societies, orality and sound, local collective imaginary, consciousness, cultural heritage, wisdom, indigenous ecological knowledge, environment, and climate.