WAFRIC Awards 2026 Nominee Spotlight | Content Creator of the Year | Sierra Leone
Content creation can do more than entertain. It can introduce people to places they have never visited, preserve cultural experiences, open conversations across borders and help audiences see familiar environments from a different perspective. For Sierra Leonean multimedia creative Yasmin Metz-Johnson, known through her platform Yasmin TELLS, storytelling is a way to explore African life, share experiences and connect people through digital media.
Through travel and lifestyle content, photography, creative direction and multimedia projects, Yasmin has developed a platform shaped by curiosity, design and a commitment to presenting African experiences through her own lens. Her work places Sierra Leone within a wider conversation about how African creators document their environments, build cultural connections and tell stories that resonate beyond national boundaries.
The Story Behind Yasmin TELLS
Yasmin TELLS takes its name from the guiding phrase “Travel, Explore, Live & Learn, Smart.” The platform encourages audiences to discover places, engage with new experiences and appreciate different dimensions of African living.
According to her official website, Yasmin Metz-Johnson is Sierra Leonean and studied interior architecture in London. Her professional experience also took her to Dakar, Senegal, where she worked at an architectural firm before returning to Sierra Leone in late 2018.
That decision to return to her country of origin became an important part of her creative journey. Rather than treating travel and international experience as reasons to remain elsewhere, she began building her work around the places, people and cultural experiences she wanted to explore more deeply.
Her background in interior architecture also offers a useful perspective on her creative practice. Architecture and visual storytelling both require attention to space, composition, detail and the ways people experience their surroundings. Through Yasmin TELLS, these interests find expression in photography, visual content, design and creative production.
The platform has since expanded beyond a conventional travel blog, bringing together several forms of creative work and providing opportunities for collaborations with individuals, organisations and brands.
Making African Cities Part of the Conversation
One of Yasmin’s notable projects was “Freetown To,” an Instagram Live series she launched during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At a time when physical travel and in-person encounters were restricted, the series created a virtual way for audiences to experience other African cities through conversations with creatives based in different locations. Destinations featured included Monrovia, Cotonou, Accra, Abidjan, Bissau and Johannesburg.
The idea offered more than a substitute for travel. It created an opportunity to hear directly from people living and working in different African environments, bringing their perspectives into a shared digital space.
Projects like this demonstrate how content creators can use accessible digital platforms to connect audiences across geographical and cultural boundaries. Rather than presenting Africa as a single, uniform experience, conversations between cities can reveal the differences, shared experiences and creative energy that shape life across the continent.
For a Sierra Leonean creator, this approach also helps position Freetown and the country’s creative community within a broader regional network.
Storytelling Through Collaboration and Conversation
Between 2019 and 2020, Yasmin co-hosted Y Square Pod with fellow Sierra Leonean creative Yasmine Bilkis Ibrahim.
The podcast explored life in Sierra Leone from the perspective of young women returning from the diaspora and navigating everyday experiences in Freetown. Its conversations addressed the realities of relocation, belonging and the opportunities and challenges of building a life in one’s country of origin.
The project reflected an interest in telling stories through conversation rather than relying exclusively on visual content. It gave listeners a way to engage with contemporary Sierra Leonean life through personal experiences and the perspectives of people navigating change.
This combination of digital storytelling formats is an important part of Yasmin’s wider creative profile. Photography, social media, podcasting and live conversations each offer different ways of sharing information and experience. Together, they create opportunities for audiences to engage with stories in more than one form.
Her work also reflects the value of collaboration in the creative industry, where connections between people, platforms and disciplines can produce new ideas and reach audiences that individual projects might not reach alone.
Photography, Creative Direction and Brand Storytelling
Yasmin’s work extends into photography, creative direction and brand identity development. Her official platform describes projects involving content production and collaborations with people, organisations and commercial brands.
She has also used photography to document Sierra Leone’s landscapes, everyday life and cultural experiences. During the first YASMIX! event in February 2021, she exhibited photographs showcasing Sierra Leone, bringing her visual storytelling into a physical space where people could experience the work together.
Her creative direction work has included a behind-the-scenes role on an Africap Apparel product campaign in Freetown, demonstrating how visual storytelling can serve both cultural expression and commercial communication.
For businesses and organisations, thoughtful content can help communicate identity, values and purpose. For audiences, it can provide a more immediate sense of the people, places and ideas behind a brand. Yasmin’s work across content creation and visual production places her at the intersection of these functions.
This breadth is relevant in an increasingly digital creative economy, where content creators may combine photography, design, storytelling and production rather than working within one narrowly defined medium.
YASMIX!: Creating Space for Creative Community
In 2021, Yasmin launched YASMIX!, an event designed to bring like-minded people together for networking and shared experiences.
The initiative reflected her interest in building connections beyond online platforms. Digital storytelling can introduce people to ideas and communities, but in-person gatherings create different opportunities for interaction, collaboration and the exchange of perspectives.
YASMIX! also provided a setting for her photography exhibition, connecting her online creative work with a physical audience. The project illustrates how a creator’s platform can develop into something broader than publishing content: it can become a meeting point for people interested in culture, creativity and new experiences.
For emerging creative communities, these spaces can be useful for making connections, discovering collaborators and encouraging conversations that may lead to future projects.
A Sierra Leonean Perspective with Regional Reach
Yasmin TELLS is rooted in Sierra Leonean identity, but its outlook extends across West Africa and beyond. Through travel-related content, conversations with creatives in other African cities and visual projects, Yasmin’s work contributes to a wider representation of contemporary African life.
This perspective matters because storytelling influences how places are understood. Content produced by people who live, work and create within their communities can offer context that outsiders may overlook. It can highlight everyday experiences, local creativity and cultural details that deserve to be seen on their own terms.
Her approach also demonstrates that a content creator’s work need not be confined to one platform or format. The same creative vision can inform a photograph, a conversation, a travel feature, a campaign or a live event.
Yasmin’s documented journey brings these elements together through a platform that combines exploration, design and storytelling while creating opportunities for cross-cultural connection.
Yasmin TELLS and the WAFRIC Awards 2026
Yasmin Metz-Johnson’s nomination for Content Creator of the Year at the WAFRIC Awards 2026, representing Sierra Leone, recognises her work in digital storytelling, visual creativity and cultural connection.
From developing Yasmin TELLS to co-hosting Y Square Pod, launching the Freetown To series and creating YASMIX!, her journey illustrates several ways content creation can connect audiences: through images, conversations, shared experiences and collaborations.
The WAFRIC Awards 2026 edition carries the theme “Recognizing the Unseen. Celebrating the Exceptional.” It celebrates West Africans whose work contributes to their creative fields and communities, across both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa.
Your vote can support Yasmin TELLS in the WAFRIC Awards 2026 public voting.
🗳️ Vote through the official WAFRIC Awards voting page.
Read the WAFRIC Awards 2026 voting procedures and criteria. Public votes contribute to the process, but votes alone do not determine the final winner. The final selection also considers nominees’ achievements, contributions and impact in line with the published criteria.
WAFRIC Awards 2026 — Recognizing the Unseen. Celebrating the Exceptional.