Alia

Helena Yasmin is a multidisciplinary artist, singer, actor, and founder of Healing for Artists. She is the creator of Hot Girls Have Trauma, a genre-blending musical exploring healing, identity, and survival through pop-R&B, movement, and storytelling. Her work spans music, visual art, performance, and essays, building emotionally rich worlds rooted in softness, transformation, and contemporary culture. Based in BCP and open to collaborations, particularly interested in exchanges with curators, galleries, spaces, festivals across visual arts, music, theatre and film.

I am an Arts educator and have been working at a local Secondary School – Bridgemary School for nearly two decades. In that time we have attained Artsmark Gold status for consecutive applications and this year attained Trinity Champion Centre for 25-26 due to our work around embedding ArtsAward into our STEAM projects.

My debut novel, The Normal State of Mind (Parthian, 2015) was long listed for the Mumbai Association of Moving Images (MAMI) Word to Screen Prize. Table Manners (Dahlia Books, 2018) won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection in 2019. My short stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4. I develop and deliver writing workshops for various art galleries and organisations around Hampshire and beyond. I teach creative writing at University of Winchester and am a trustee of The Winchester Poetry Festival. I’ve also developed ands teach a short story course for Professional Writing Academy. I’m co-founder of Write Beyond Borders, a transnational mentoring project writers from South Asia and its diaspora.