Yasmine Al Massri

Yasmine Al Massri is an international actress and human rights advocate who lives between Los Angeles, Paris and Beirut. She recently guest starred in Law and Order’s most acclaimed episode tackling the Harvey Weinstein scandal. From a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, Al Massri was born and raised in Lebanon, before moving to Paris at the age of twenty to study.

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Al Massri’s first big break as an actress was in the award-winning Lebanese film Caramel, written and directed by Nadine Labaki. At the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, it received great critical acclaim and went on to be the most successful Arab film to date. Al Massri spent her formative years being recognised as a refugee in the country she knew as her home.

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In January 1856, Margaret Garner – an enslaved woman on a Kentucky plantation – ran with members of her family to the free state of Ohio. As slave catchers attempted to capture the fugitives in Cincinnati, Garner cut the throat of her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to prevent her return to slavery. Toni Morrison first imaginatively treated Margaret Garner’s infanticide in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987).