The Making of a Visual Archives

MiCA presents a storytelling and photography workshop with Alia Youssef.

About this event

Many of our most cherished memories come out of time spent with loved ones. With December breaks coming soon, and restrictions easing, opportunities to create more are just around the corner.

Alia Youssef, a skilled portrait and documentary photographer, is hosting a workshop on how to craft beautiful visual stories with photography. We will learn a little about some photography basics like lighting and framing, but we will also learn what it takes to create beautiful visual stories and why their creation and use are so important in marginalized and underrepresented communities. We hope you will leave the event inspired to create visual stories of your own. About Alia Youssef Alia Youssef is a Vancouver-based portrait and documentary photographer interested in complicating representations of marginalized groups and national narratives, as well as highlighting underrepresented stories and histories. Her personal projects have been exhibited in solo and group shows at prominent galleries and festivals across Canada such as Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, The Ryerson Image Centre Student Gallery, The Parliament of Canada, Presentation House Gallery, and Nuit Blanche Toronto. Her commercial projects with global brands have been displayed internationally, including in New York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus. Her work has been published in numerous online and print publications including The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, The Narwhal, and Elle Magazine. Alia has done many public artist talks, most notably for the Aga Khan Museum, We Day Toronto, and Instagram. She completed the Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Media program at Ryerson University and was awarded the Ryerson University Gold Medal. Alia Youssef’s website

About Moska Rokay

Moska Rokay is the Digital Humanities Research Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies (University of Toronto) tasked with coordinating the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA). She is an advocate for community-centered, activist archives, especially of diaspora communities. She completed her Master of Information at the University of Toronto (2019). In 2020, she was the recipient of the ACA New Professional Award and Archivaria’s Gordon Dodds Student Paper Prize. She currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Archives Association of Ontario (AAO) as Director Without Portfolio.  About Alia Youssef’s Projects  Generations showcases multigenerational group portraits of Muslim women from 30 different families from 7 cities across Canada. This project complicates the generally simplistic depictions of Muslim communities by asserting an intergenerational record of our experiences through a gendered lens. It’s also a space for multiple generations of Muslim women to assert how they would like to be represented both visually and in a biography and reclaim the histories which have been largely rendered absent.

About the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA)

The Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA), a collaborative and participatory initiative at the Institute for Islamic Studies (IIS), provides a platform for the missing Muslim voices in Canada. 

MiCA acquires, organizes, preserves, and makes accessible records of and about Canadian Muslim individuals and organizations that possess enduring value for the preservation of the history and documentary heritage of Muslims in Canada. About the Event Series The Community Collaborations Learning Series is a series of collaborative events where MiCA hosts a discussion or talk with an archive or related public history/community storytelling/cultural heritage initiative. These events allow MiCA to leverage its platform and audience to showcase the multitude of archives and archives-adjacent initiatives to a wider audience and learn from other related initiatives about community-centred, decolonial, anti-racist, and radical archival practice.