Ayla El-Moussa is a multidisciplinary artist whose work blends photography, self-portraiture, film, and digital painting into a singular language of form, feeling, and myth. Though her own body often appears at the center of her compositions, her work is not autobiographical. Instead, she uses herself as a medium, a mirror through which larger archetypes, subconscious states, and universal stories can be explored.
Deeply influenced by surrealism, El-Moussa approaches her practice as a kind of visual philosophy. Her recurring motifs of waves, water, skin, light are not simply aesthetic, but symbolic. The ocean, in particular, serves as both subject and metaphor: a site of memory, dissolution, and constant return.
Over time, her work has shifted from expansive compositions to increasingly dreamlike abstract fragments inviting the viewer to come closer, to look again, and to lose themselves in texture and detail. Her process is multilayered and intentionally unclassifiable, weaving photography, video, digital painting, and hand-applied materials to create works that feel both ancient and futuristic, intimate and mythic.
El-Moussa’s ongoing body of work resists linearity, embracing slowness, depth, and ritual. She sees art-making as a form of integration of history, of personal and collective memory.