Hello 👋🏾,
I’m a Nigerian artist, thinker, and researcher building life-affirming systems.
These days, I’m interested in creating hospitable environments for making and sharing knowledge as a form of social healing in the wake of slavery, colonialism, dictatorship, and their economic and ecological residues in postcolonial societies like Nigeria. Part of the epistemic injustice of these regimes is that the sovereign pursuit of knowledge was criminalised—socially, culturally, and legally. Cultivating the capacity to be and feel at home in one’s mind, body, community, lineage, and natural environment is one way to address this injustice. It’s one of the ways I’m most interested in.
Press bio:
Rose Nneoma Abba runs Studio Styles, an art and research practice.
Through it, she has produced projects such as the Restful anthology of Nigerian reflections (2025) and the Sweet Medicine podcast (2024), funded by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria and the Open Society Foundations, respectively.
She studied Global Intellectual and Imperial History, Comparative Literature and Cultural Theory, then began her career as a journalist, essayist, documentary photographer, and artist-filmmaker exploring how Nigerians make a living, find belonging, and create meaning in their lives. Her memoir essay on the 2025 Sosoliso plane crash, ‘The Fire in My Memory,’ won the inaugural Abebi AfroNonfiction award and was longlisted for the Wasafiri Life Writing Prize in 2023.
Her debut short film, You Matter to Me (2022), premiered at the Royal African Society’s Film Africa festival and won the inaugural Rising Star Award at the 2023 Surreal 16 Film Festival in Lagos. Her second short film, Our Bodies, Nigeria’s Ghosts (2025), was produced through the Goethe-Institut Nigeria’s post-Memory post-Archive fellowship, and is currently making its way around Nigeria and Europe.
I am the child of an Enugu-Ezike woman and an Nsukka man, very happily and proudly.
My practice has been supported in different capacities by
2025: Independent Arts, Ugo Ude Anna, Ozoz Sokoh;
2024: Aaliyah Ibrahim, the Goethe-Institut Nigeria, the Open Society Foundations;
2023: Gradar Futures, Effiom Nyeh;
2021: Abuja Literary Festival;
2020: For Creative Girls (mentored by Hallie Haller), Chidera Okobo, Chukwuebuka Ibeh;
and all past project collaborators as credited on each project. I have endless gratitude for the contributions, participation, and support from everyone who has attended any studio event or engaged with any studio project.Thank you.
Studio Styles is named after the photographer Styles, in the play Sizwe Bansi is Dead (Fugard, Ntshona, Kani).
Styles used his studio as a “strong room of dreams” for his Black community under apartheid South Africa.