Yamani is a multi-hyphenate creative with formal training and talent as a draughtsman, scenic painter, mixed media designer and arts educator. Over the last decade she has primarily lent her creative talents and design education to art-direction within communications campaigns at organizations she’s led. However she believes that “artist” is core to her identity and for two decades, in her “spare time” she has been a muralist for private and public clients, made sculptural furniture, and produced issue based public spectacle performance. Since her youth, as a muralist with Marwen and a student at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, she has sought to maintain artistic practice while in pursuit of social justice even if only as an aspiring home decor influencer.

Yamani began as a fine arts major at Cornell University, before changing to an individual curriculum focused on design activism in the school of Human Ecology.  Even while in school, she sought opportunities to use her artistic talents to amplify systemically muffled voices such as those of indigenous men incarcerated in upstate New York who used nail polish brushes as paintbrushes to create beautiful scenic paintings on envelopes in her art classes with them.

In 2003, Yamani went to architecture school where her work centered on design, critique and analysis of the intersection of social and physical space.  There, she developed a theoretical and diagrammatic typology of “activist architecture” that she imagined as an interventionist public sculptural practice.  This typology, draws on the theory of critical spacial practice that challenges the notion of building for consumption rather than social experience.  Further it investigates the precedence and potential for three-dimensional insertions in the built environment to inspire public debate and instigate social action. Yamani has always been interested in the practice of building small scale structures in places that they do not “belong” for people who do not “belong”.  This work is demarcation and reclamation of social and physical space for people and activities that exist on the margins and outside of social norms. 

More recently Yamani’s artistic interests center around the practice and performance of healing and social space. Drawing on the trajectory of situationist theory and practice, she seeks to construct situations that critique and challenge stereotypes and mainstream social norms. The artifacts from these situations can comprise tangible ‘art-work’ or what some consider “products” however documenting the situations, or ‘performances’ themselves are the true work. She sees this body of work relating to the ongoing conceptual frame-work and cultural aesthetic of afro-futurism that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and magic realism with non-western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical hegemonic trajectory of the experiences and situations that people encounter. This work takes the form of many media, including artifice photography, graphic revision and appropriation of popular material culture, and participatory/interactive situations, experiences and built structures, or combinations of them all.