Yassine Alaoui Ismaili, known as Yoriyas, is a Moroccan street photographer, choreographer, and filmmaker born in 1984 and based in Casablanca. He began his artistic life as a competitive breakdancer, founding the celebrated crew Lhiba Kingzoo at age 16, winning multiple Moroccan championships between 2006 and 2010, and placing third at the World Finals in Copenhagen — becoming one of the first Arabic and African dancers to rank in the world’s top six B-boys. In 2013, a serious knee injury brought his dance career to an abrupt end, and he turned to photography as a new form of expression, drawing on his background in chess, mathematics, and choreography to develop an instantly recognizable visual language built on intuitive composition, bold color, and a masterful sense of movement and space. His most celebrated body of work, Casablanca Not the Movie — begun in 2014 — is a love letter to his hometown and a deliberate rebuttal of the Orientalist and Hollywood-driven images that have long defined the city’s global perception. His work has been featured in the New York Times and National Geographic, exhibited internationally at institutions including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and Kyotographie in Japan, and is held in the collections of the Royal Collection of Morocco, the Hermès Foundation, and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. In 2020, he was invited to curate the inaugural exhibition at Morocco’s National Photography Museum in Rabat.
Yassine Alaoui Ismaili, known as Yoriyas, is a Moroccan street photographer, choreographer, and filmmaker born in 1984 and based in Casablanca. He began his artistic life as a competitive breakdancer, founding the celebrated crew Lhiba Kingzoo at age 16, winning multiple Moroccan championships between 2006 and 2010, and placing third at the World Finals in Copenhagen — becoming one of the first Arabic and African dancers to rank in the world’s top six B-boys. In 2013, a serious knee injury brought his dance career to an abrupt end, and he turned to photography as a new form of expression, drawing on his background in chess, mathematics, and choreography to develop an instantly recognizable visual language built on intuitive composition, bold color, and a masterful sense of movement and space. His most celebrated body of work, Casablanca Not the Movie — begun in 2014 — is a love letter to his hometown and a deliberate rebuttal of the Orientalist and Hollywood-driven images that have long defined the city’s global perception. His work has been featured in the New York Times and National Geographic, exhibited internationally at institutions including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and Kyotographie in Japan, and is held in the collections of the Royal Collection of Morocco, the Hermès Foundation, and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. In 2020, he was invited to curate the inaugural exhibition at Morocco’s National Photography Museum in Rabat.