Yasha la Bella was born in Queens, New York in 2000. Whether her earliest years unfolded in Fresh Meadows, Queens Village, or Utopia is unclear even to her now. Much of her tender childhood has dissolved into time and circumstance, leaving behind impressions rather than records. What remains vivid is her instinct for performance. As a child, she wore her mother’s clothes and shoes, staged elaborate concerts in living rooms, and announced to anyone who would listen that she would be an actress. It was never a question of if, only how.
The first child of teenage parents, she was relocated to suburban Atlanta at the age of three, when money and opportunity thinned in New York. In the quiet Georgia woodlands far from the urgency of the city, her inner life surfaced. There, she discovered the texture of softness. Over the years, she reached for any medium capable of holding it: music, painting, photography, filmmaking, even early influencer content creation. The through line was always acting.
She began performing in summer stock musical theatre before returning to New York in pursuit of the stories that once flickered across the silver screen of her childhood imagination. Just before graduating from NYU, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, marking a profound rupture in the film industry. Between the pandemic and the labor strikes that followed, the industry fell quiet. So she made her own work.
She wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a trilogy of iPhone films exploring loss, identity, and artifice. These intimate dramas became the prototypes for EPILOGUE, her debut experimental short examining coming of age, femininity, and spirituality. The project was both a critical and commercial success, premiering as part of a month-long in-store exhibition of her filmmaking process in partnership with & Other Stories at their Soho flagship. EPILOGUE later became an official selection at NewFest and the Cannes World Film Festival.
Alongside her emerging film work, la Bella built a parallel career as a commercial model, appearing in campaigns for Google, MILK Makeup, Sephora, and others. While this visibility cultivated a devoted following, it also sharpened her desire for authorship. That desire led her to directing social-first films and photographic stories for beauty, fashion, and cultural institutions. From the sophisticated glamour of Prada Beauty to contemporary reinterpretations of Old Hollywood fashion icons — including a modern “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” — her work is defined by dark glamour, inky sensuality, precise storytelling, and a persistent sense of anemoia: nostalgia for a time and place never personally known.
Her subjects are complex and antiheroic, often situated within the visual language of old Americana. An ageless force such as nature, spirit or even time itself, presses against them. La Bella moves fluidly between director and muse, introducing self-awareness that heightens both the artifice of beauty and the dramatic tension within the frame. At the core of her practice is acting. The ability to inhabit whatever role is required to realize a vision remains her most enduring gift. She is a true multi-hyphenate, assembling a body of work that lives at the intersection of performance, authorship, and belonging. Work fit for a black swan.
