ABOUT

Malika Paige Yansaneh is a Director, Designer, and VFX Artist with a passion for telling stories that are electrifying yet thought provoking. Malika build worlds both narratively and visually that her child self could only ever imagine existing. You see, her life has been a series of divine alignment and vision. As a child, she would look up and gaze at the stars and see a world full of possibility embedded within the twinkles of the light in the dark sky. The ability to create without bounds is what led her to pursue architecture. The desire to radicalize the way the world was curated and conceptualized beyond the built environment is what evolved her practice from solely architecture and into the world of fiction and entertainment. Malika's journey into film was through the lens of design. When every physical inch of an architectural design morphed into a visualized world within a second on screen; she knew her perspective had shifted. With a wide range of visualization and design experience working with companies such as The Museum of Science Fiction, Hilton, Marriott, Port Authority New York New Jersey: Innovation, City of Chicago Department of Planning & Development, and Cooper Carry; Malika utilizes her design eye as her superpower in filmmaking.

Formally trained as an Architect, she uses world-building to craft stories through the intersection of designed world and narrative methodology. Malika leverages her background to tell stories that depict the “why’s” of our world. It is her dream to impact the world by giving a voice to people through telling stories that inspire, reimagine, and redefine how we perceive our world. She dreams of a future that humanizes the hero and understands the villain as a mechanism for deciphering the fragility of humanity. It is this persistent dream that transcends surroundings, disciplines of practice, and resources that has led Malika to where she is on her journey thus far. And it is on this journey that she has learned how to use both her technical skill sets in architecture, design and visual effects as well as her narrative adept to tell stories. 

Her alma mater Rensselaer said “Why not change the world” and she took that and ran with it. On that run, Malika had a stop at SCI Arc in the postgraduate Fiction & Entertainment program where she learned that the world is changed one day at a time. It is changed one diagram at a time, one film at a time, and one story at a time. This journey persists onward and as she searches for the next stop in this unyielding marathon she reintroduces herself.

Born in Prince George's County, Maryland to a Jamaican Mother and a Sierra Leonean Father, Malika always had a strong sense of her cultural identity. Raised by a single Mother with strong influences from her Grandmother, Malika grew up immersed in Black & Caribbean culture providing her with a deep sense of pride that allowed her to create from a state of liberation. This strong sense of cultural identity has informed many aspects of Malika's work both visually and thematically. Malika Paige Yansaneh; a Director, a Designer, a VFX Artist, a proud Afro-Caribbean woman, a woman driven by faith, and she is ready to let the light in.

Resume available upon request.