Franco-Algerian Yamina was born in post-war Paris, shaped from the start by a spirit of resistance. A natural rebel, she became a teenage activist during Algeria’s war of independence. In 1962, at just 18, she moved to newly-liberated Algeria to work as a schoolteacher. Five years later, she returned to Paris and enrolled at the radical, avant-garde Vincennes University, a hotbed of student activism. There, she studied under some of the most revolutionary intellectuals of the era, surrounded by a circle of alternative artists and free thinkers. After joining the front lines of the May 1968 protests, Yamina went on to graduate with a degree in psychology and sociology.
She worked as a psychologist until her retirement, after which her newfound freedom allowed her to fully devote herself to her greatest passions—sculpture and art—expressing them through the medium of jewellery.