THE VISA
Yaya needs to raise £7,500 by July for their artist visa application. This covers the application fees and the NHS Immigration Health Surcharge for five years, and partial support for endorsement of their artistic work. The UK’s hostile immigration environment makes this process complex and uncertain.
Yaya’s divestment from exploitative, pro-genocide structures in the art industry, coupled with the impact of chronic pain and disability with a lack of a support network, has made this ongoing journey difficult.
With your help, we can secure not only funds but also the necessary endorsements to offer opportunities for Yaya’s artwork to be platformed in ways that meet immigration requirements. If the visa application is unsuccessful, funds will instead support Yaya in accessing essential gender-affirming care and rebuilding their life elsewhere if forced to leave the UK.
Why this matters
London is a place where Yaya has built a safer life, found loving communities where they can express their identity without compromise. Returning to a transphobic and ableist environment would be devastating, forcing them to start over from scratch.
Supporting Yaya means preserving a vital presence in London’s grassroots communities, honoring their contributions, and protecting their right to thrive.
Let’s come together to ensure Yaya can stay, heal, and continue nurturing the spaces we need. Every contribution counts.
ABOUT YAYA:
Yaya is a beloved community-organizer, artist, and apprentice herbalist living in London. They are dedicated to creating spaces of healing and growth for marginalized communities, especially QTIBIPOC and disabled individuals. Yaya offers herbal remedies, organizes mutual-aid efforts and nurtures spaces for communal grieving, political education, and workshops blending art and nature.
Central to Yaya’s work is a powerful commitment to challenging the ways we embody structures of harm. They bring practices into community to confronting the internalized policing, state, and patriarchal violence that often replicate within our own bodies and relationships, fostering intentional spaces to brave our way across these influences, live by our values, and collectively redefine resilience, love, and care — both with one another and the Land itself.
Yaya’s artistic practice is heart-led and deeply intuitive, weaving animation, storytelling, and somatic awareness to challenge industry norms and embrace the needs of disabled and neurodivergent creators.
