Y.Misdaq aka Yoshi

Y. Misdaq a.k.a. Yoshi
photograph – Janine Storm van Leeuwen
Background information
Origin	Brighton, UK
Genres	Hip-hop, electronica, folk. Fiction, poetry, Non-Fiction. Observational documentary.
Instruments	Samples, vocals, keyboard, guitar
Years active	2002–present
Labels	Nefisa UK
Website	yusufmisdaq.wordpress.com

Y. Misdaq a.k.a. Yoshi (born in Brighton, England) is a multimedia artist, writer, creative consultant, and is founder of the arts website Nefisa, which also doubles as an independent media label- Nefisa UK. Since 2004 he has released 4 LPs, 3 documentaries and 3 novels, and most recently has released a poetry series (6 separate volumes of poetry) as well as appearing on numerous works, either anonymously or under different pseudonyms as writer, filmmaker, and performer.

Y. Misdaq a.k.a. Yoshi has been featured in magazines like The WIRE,Hip-Hop Connection,Stylus,The Brighton Source, and numerous others. Upon the publication of his debut novel in June 2007, Misdaq's work was also featured on BBC Television & Radio. More recently he was featured on NPR in the United States. and PRI internationally.

Misdaq was also present in Benghazi at the onset of the 2011 Libyan civilian uprising against Muammar Ghadaffi, which he covered alongside Anjali Kamat for Democracy Now!.

An ethnic Zazai Pashtun Y. Misdaq was born and raised in Brighton on the south coast of England. His father, Dr. Nabi Misdaq, is an eminent scholar and author on the social and political history of Afghanistan and was also head of the BBC World Service Pashto Section – which he founded – for a decade in the 1990s. His mother, Arian Misdaq, also an Afghan originally from Kabul, is a psychoanalyst specialising in multi-cultural counselling, working with CMHS.

In 2002 he began Nefisa, a somewhat amorphous arts collective which featured frequent updates and comment on creative, spiritual and political topics by Misdaq. It also featured the early work of many other artists including Julia Clark-Lowes who went on to form The Pipettes and later The Indelicates, San Francisco graffiti artist Daniel Cordani, avante-garde musician and erstwhile Hollywood film composer MichL Britsch amongst others. Misdaq frequently used the website to comment upon immediate news-events such as the Iraq War, the 7/7 bombings of London and the Danish cartoon controversy – for which Misdaq wrote a combined short-story and article which was spread widely across the internet in the days following the initial reaction. It was similarly a small creatively tinged hub for community action such as annual soup-drives for the homeless of the city of Brighton and anti-war marches in both Brighton and London alike. Misdaq spoke at length about Nefisa in a 2011 interview with the UK's Radical Middle Way. "It was [also] pretty special in that it was a precursor to myspace and facebook, each artist I featured would have their own profiles, one photograph only; they listed their influences and such, but crucially, they also had their own galleries of ongoing work… So that gave certain artists the feeling that their creative output had a potential audience, and this in itself was a meaning-giver for a lot of those artists, crucial to a few of them. So, you could say it was a committedly non-commercial variant of a social network, with deeper social implications. If all of today's trendy technologies truly encouraged people's innate creativity, instead of just talking like they do, then that would be great." In 2007, after five years of operation, Nefisa UK ceased as a blog/showcase and energies were focused solely on its capacity as a media label.