ArtworxTO Spotlight: Warda Youssouf

Meet this week’s ArtworxTO’s Spotlight Emerging Artist Warda Youssouf. Warda Youssouf is a producer (film + events), poet and visual artist living in Toronto. Born in Djibouti and raised in the UK. She was the recipient of the David Maltby Award in 2019 for her exhibition “Roots”, and of a Toronto Refugee Mentorship Grant, to help develop her first feature film, People from Nowhere in (2019).

Her practice is engaged with themes of home, identity, and displacement. From 2018- 2019 She engaged her local and artistic community through production and curation of story-telling shows and art therapy events at venues across Toronto like Hashtag Gallery. She feels like her art is her creation (children) and therefore feels the process of creation from birth to production and finally consumption of the work. Making art is a physical inner and outer body experience for her. We see this in her later exhibition at Gallery44's “Looking forward” exhibit and her Ryerson Image Centre response to “The way she looks”. Lastly Warda founded @thehouse.of.arts in August 2021 and she has been giving emerging artists of all mediums/practises: a stage, a home, and a community of supporters.