About Rose:
Rose Nneoma Abba lives in Enugu, Nigeria.
She runs Studio Styles, her art and research practice, through which she produces projects on ‘social healing’ as she defines it: a continual process of finding home in ourselves, our communities, our histories, and our environment through relational and improvisational ways of knowing.
Notable Studio Styles projects include 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.
After earning degrees in History, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Theory from London and Oxford, she began her career as a writer, journalist, and documentary photographer 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.
She loves life, and does it all for love—in the spirit of thinkers and organisers like Paolo Freire.
Hello 👋🏾,
My name is Rose Nneoma Abba, and I’m a Nigerian artist, thinker, and researcher working towards a more loving world.
My goal is to create hospitable environments for making and sharing knowledge as a form of social healing, especially in the wake of slavery, colonialism, dictatorship, and their economic and ecological residues in Nigeria.
Studio Styles is my workshop for this endeavour. It exists to cultivate the feeling of being at home- in mind, body, community, lineage, and environment. I think of this not as a project with a capturable target but as a practice of re-orienting how we relate to each other, to things, to the earth, to history, to pleasure and beauty.
I learn, teach, work, and share through relationship and improvisation, inviting people to inhabit this world of ‘feeling at home’, emotionally, intellectually, and sensorially.
My approach to knowledge, community, and the world is shaped equally by my domestic upbringing, navigating Nigeria as an independent artist and researcher, and educational programs that blended rigorous intellectual engagement with immersive cultural, social, and spiritual experiences. From both their teachings and blind spots, I learnt not just history, literature, and theory but also how to learn through my body and its senses.
I live in Nigeria to experience the world from here, to understand my country and continent on my own terms, and to grow my capacity to serve the Global Majority while contributing to educational and cultural infrastructure that is generative and loving.
I’m the child of an Enugu-Ezike woman and an Nsukka man, very happily and proudly.
I wonder if someday I'll wake up and find myself immersed in a world where the colonial mark is no longer a shadow I must navigate, contend with, or defend against, but simply one of many points—a provincialised point. I’m working/walking towards that world, but I sense that when I get there, it would be something else entirely.
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.
I saw the play in 2011 as a secondary school student and I carry its spirit—storytelling work as a matter of life and death—with me everywhere.