About Us
T-HIYA: A Platform Rooted in Resistance and Collective Emancipation
T-HIYA is a platform born from the legacy of Tihya/ Dihya known as Kahina, the Amazigh queen and warrior who embodied resilience against oppression, fighting tirelessly to protect her people’s rights and dignity.
Her story is a beacon of courage, wisdom, and unyielding determination. It fuels our commitment to justice today. Grounded in intersectional feminism and informed by Antonio Gramsci’s vision of convergence in struggle, we recognize that emancipation arises when diverse movements unite to dismantle oppressive systems and reclaim power collectively.
T-HIYA stands at the crossroads of art, activism, and academia. We merge research with lived experiences, humanizing data through survivor testimonials and activist insights. By bridging feminist theory and praxis, we empower civil society to confront oppression in all its forms.
Core Missions
Monitor & Disseminate
Provide real-time tracking of gender-based violence incidents, regressive legal developments, and feminist legal milestones via interactive dashboards and accessible public reports.
Advocate with Purpose
Convert survivor testimonies into targeted advocacy campaigns, petitions, and public mobilization efforts to hold institutions accountable and elevate grassroots voices.
Empower Through Knowledge
Disseminate rights-based toolkits, simplified legal guides, and actionable policy analyses to combat systemic barriers affecting women and marginalized communities in Morocco.
Amplify Grassroots Insights
Partner with local scholars to co-publish ground-level research on rural gender-based violence, migrant worker rights, and climate justice intersections.
Curate & Educate
Assemble multilingual creative resources—films, literature, podcasts, exhibition catalogs, and blogs to explore gender dynamics, survivor resilience, and pathways to collective emancipation.
Reclaim Histories
Archiving Morocco’s intersectional feminist legacies through public storytelling initiatives that showcase marginalized voices and untold narratives.
Build Connected Networks
Launch a real-time geotagged mapping platform linking survivors to NGOs, shelters, counselors, legal aid..etc while fostering collaboration among activists, researchers, and policymakers to address systemic gaps and coordinate emergency responses.
OUR Team
Rajaa Essaghyry
General Coordinator & Chief Operations Officer
She is a cultural studies researcher and activist pursuing her PhD at Keele University, where she investigates the aesthetics of emancipation in Moroccan cinema during the politically repressive Years of Lead era. Alongside her academic work, she collaborates with NGOs to implement art and culture projects that promote democracy, human rights, and social justice.
Her practice includes co-directing award-winning documentaries that center marginalized narratives, notably exploring themes of gender-based violence, migration, and forced displacement. By blending her research with hands-on activism, she shows how creative expression can serve as both a lens for understanding oppression and a catalyst for transformative change.
Inès Bouallou
Artistic Director & Creative Lead / Photographer
She was born in 1994 in Salé, is a photographer and poet. Her work explores themes of gender and the body as a non-gendered subject of research and study. Through her photographic practice, which centers on self-portraiture as a key iconographic motif, she distances herself from contemporary pictorial standards while reinventing ancient aesthetic traditions rooted in the duality of self and other. Often described as a painter-photographer, Bouallou interrogates gendered identities by multiplying her Self in self-portraits, deconstructing and desexualizing societal norms. Her images—constructed, then deconstructed, manipulated and wholly fabricated—leave behind only traces of their making and a narrative framework imbued with the passage of time, mirroring the body’s evolving nature.
Rajae Hammadi
Communications & Audiovisual Officer / Filmmaker
She is a Moroccan human rights advocate, illustrator, and artist born and raised in Casablanca, holds a master’s degree in marketing from the École Nationale de Commerce et de Gestion. After working for two years (2012–2014) as a reporter for Global Girl Media—an international NGO dedicated to amplifying women’s voices through citizen journalism—she rose to become its Program Director.
Her work focuses on pressing social justice issues, including rural educational inequities, the rights of Sub-Saharan migrant women in Morocco, youth political empowerment, and inclusive governance. She co-created the award-winning documentary short Breaking the Silence: Moroccans Speak Out!, which confronts street sexual harassment and challenges systemic gender-based violence.
Nabil Ferdaoussi
Director of Development & Strategic Partnerships
He is a Doctoral Research Fellow at HUMA-Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town. He is an Associate Researcher at the Center for Global Studies at International University of Rabat. His doctoral research is a forensic examination of the interlocking relationships between border death, racism, visuality and postmortem violence at the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands. His work aims at rethinking and decolonizing knowledge production in migration and border studies research, deploying African epistemologies.
Rajaa Essaghyry
General Coordinator & Chief Operations Officer
She is a cultural studies researcher and activist pursuing her PhD at Keele University, where she investigates the aesthetics of emancipation in Moroccan cinema during the politically repressive Years of Lead era. Alongside her academic work, she collaborates with NGOs to implement art and culture projects that promote democracy, human rights, and social justice.
Her practice includes co-directing award-winning documentaries that center marginalized narratives, notably exploring themes of gender-based violence, migration, and forced displacement. By blending her research with hands-on activism, she shows how creative expression can serve as both a lens for understanding oppression and a catalyst for transformative change.
Inès Bouallou
Artistic Director & Creative Lead / Photographer
She was born in 1994 in Salé, is a photographer and poet. Her work explores themes of gender and the body as a non-gendered subject of research and study. Through her photographic practice, which centers on self-portraiture as a key iconographic motif, she distances herself from contemporary pictorial standards while reinventing ancient aesthetic traditions rooted in the duality of self and other. Often described as a painter-photographer, Bouallou interrogates gendered identities by multiplying her Self in self-portraits, deconstructing and desexualizing societal norms. Her images—constructed, then deconstructed, manipulated and wholly fabricated—leave behind only traces of their making and a narrative framework imbued with the passage of time, mirroring the body’s evolving nature.
Rajae Hammadi
Communications & Audiovisual Officer / Filmmaker
She is a Moroccan human rights advocate, illustrator, and artist born and raised in Casablanca, holds a master’s degree in marketing from the École Nationale de Commerce et de Gestion. After working for two years (2012–2014) as a reporter for Global Girl Media—an international NGO dedicated to amplifying women’s voices through citizen journalism—she rose to become its Program Director.
Her work focuses on pressing social justice issues, including rural educational inequities, the rights of Sub-Saharan migrant women in Morocco, youth political empowerment, and inclusive governance. She co-created the award-winning documentary short Breaking the Silence: Moroccans Speak Out!, which confronts street sexual harassment and challenges systemic gender-based violence.
Nabil Ferdaoussi
Director of Development & Strategic Partnerships
He is a Doctoral Research Fellow at HUMA-Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town. He is an Associate Researcher at the Center for Global Studies at International University of Rabat. His doctoral research is a forensic examination of the interlocking relationships between border death, racism, visuality and postmortem violence at the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands. His work aims at rethinking and decolonizing knowledge production in migration and border studies research, deploying African epistemologies.
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