Yasmina's Legacy
In a career spanning over forty years, Yasmina has experienced multiple levels of working as a professional dancer. Beginning her training in the 1980’s with
renowned teachers and musicians including Suraya Hilal and Hossam Ramzy, she went on to perform in the thriving Arabic, Turkish and Greek nightclubs of London, with musicians from Cairo, learning to express the music live on stage.
A year-long stint in Italy and then six months in Casablanca Morocco was followed by several years touring the Middle East on back-to-back hotel
contracts for Lebanese impresario Toros Siranossian in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Jordan and Syria, before finally arriving in Cairo in 1995.
Yasmina’s teaching career began back in 1999 when she began teaching workshops worldwide. Over the past twenty five years she has performed and
taught, sometimes multiple times, in the US (New York, Miami, Las Vegas), Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Tasmania) Japan (Tokyo, Osaka,
Nagoya), South Africa (Cape Town, Durban), Bali, Fiji, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the UK. She has toured with her live band from Cairo in the UK and Australia, and choreographed several theatre shows for various dance ensembles, both in the UK and South Africa.
Since 2019 Yasmina has been dividing her time increasingly between Cairo and the UK, where she is co-director of Bellydance Now, a dance organization that offers dancers both in and outside the UK multiple ways to engage through performance, training, courses about the music, history, and culture of the dance, and travel to Egypt.
Here Yasmina retrained with choreographers Ibrahim Akef and Raqia Hassan, learning contemporary Egyptian style. Her first contract was at the Meridien Heliopolis, where she remained for nearly two years, before moving to the Nile Maxim. She also performed regularly at the Semiramis, Safir, Pyramisa, Tivoli Heliopolis and other nightclubs, as well as hundreds of weddings and parties around Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, for a period of eight years.
