Leyla Josephine is an artist from Glasgow. She is a creative facilitator, a performance poet and a theatre/film maker.
Leyla graduated from The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2013 from BA Contemporary Performance Practice. In that same year, she started performing at spoken word nights and in the following year won The UK National Slam at The Royal Albert Hall ran by Hammer and Tongue. She has since then won The Commonwealth Slam 2014 andThe Loud Poets Grand Slam 2016. She was a finalist in the Roundhouse Slam 2017 and runner up for The Scottish Championships 2018. She has been lucky enough to perform her poetry in Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Ireland, The Czech Republic, Canada and in The US.
Her solo shows Hopeless and Daddy Drag have taken the UK by storm with sold out shows across the country. Hopeless was runner up for Saboteur’s Best Spoken Word Show 2018. Daddy Drag won the Autopsy Award 2019 which celebrates artists making ground-breaking work in Scotland. It was also shortlisted for Filipa Braganca Award 2019, which honours solo female artists creating important work at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Leyla’s book In Public/In Private was published October 2022. The collection of poems has been created with the support of Creative Scotland. She has been mentored by poet Kim Addonizio through the process.
A documentation of her show Hopeless is published by Speculative Books. She has been in included in an American anthology about abortion called Choice Words: Writers On Abortions alongside the likes Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde and Gloria Steinem. Two of her poems have been published in The Centenary Collection for Edwin Morgan. She was featured in Neu! Reekies! anthology Untitled 3.
She has had poems featured in The National, The Scotsman, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Upworthy, BBC Scotland, BBC Radio 4, BBC Social and Gutter magazine.
In 2022 Leyla received funding from John Mather’s Rising Star award and developed a new play with National Theatre of Scotland. Leyla’s play Ms Campbell’s Class 4th Period was performed by young people globally and published with Bloomsbury Press as part of Wonderfools’ Positive Stories for Negative Times.
Her live album Archive:Live! is available on all streaming sites.
Leyla was named in The List’s Top 100 Artists To Watch in 2019.