Ayla El-Moussa (American, b. 1991)is a photographer and digital artist who combines self-portraiture, drone-captured footage, painting, and digital abstraction to explore the body, nature, and form.,,Her early work used her own nude body as both subject and muse, a stance she has said was meant to reverse the traditional idea of the woman as passive muse for a male artist.
In 2015she began making moving image works that combined self-portraiture with drone footage into what she calls “visual philosophies”,later minting this work on the platform SuperRare.She was commissioned to contribute to the Miami Beach Art Collection, a Playboy-themed NFT project, with a piece titled Ride the Wave that reworked the Playboy Bunny figure and sold for close to 70 ETH.,In August 2021 she released Nude Pixels, a set of 40 self-portraits rendered in pixelated form so that the closer a viewer looks, the more the figure dissolves.,
In November 2022, she was profiled alongside four other photographers and videographers working with nude imagery in NFTs.That December, she joined a panel at “The Gateway” in Miami with Christie's digital art sales staff and Manifold co-founder Richerd Chen to discuss the auction house's move into NFT sales.,She described Christie's engagement with the space as “having a primary sale with an institution that means so much”.Her piece Century of Self was also auctioned at Christie'sthat December.
In 2023 she released Nude Abstracts, moving from full-body imagery to abstracted forms as the lead image while keeping the original portrait accessible beneath it.A related piece, Parts of Her, sold at Christie's,in 2024 and became a turning point in her practice, marking a shift away from picturing herself and toward a more universal figure she refers to only as her.
In 2025she released Bodies of Color on the Shape network, her first project away from Ethereum mainnet.Each piece began as a studio photograph split into four sections and layered with color fields generated from 100 Pantone palettes, a process she said was shaped by Brancusi and Henry Moore's fragmented sculpture, Georgia O'Keeffe's use of color, and James Turrell's immersive light installations.,Bodies of Color launched on Shape on November 4, 2025.
