Info:
Immaculata Abba is an artist, researcher, and cultural producer.
Her research spans history, cultural theory, and economic life in West Africa—examining everything from labour valuation and material sourcing to market women’s thought and colonial masculinity. She holds degrees from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Oxford.
She is the director of Studio Styles, a project space for historical reflection and social healing Under the space, she created Sweet Medicine (2024), a public humanities initiative on social healing through the humanities, supported by the Open Society Foundations.
As an artist working in film, writing, and photography, her acclaimed debut short film You Matter to Me (2022) debuted at the BFI London for Film Africa and has been screened internationally. She is currently developing a second film supported by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria. Her essays and features, published in over 60 outlets, cover Africapitalism, spirituality, ecology, art, and everyday survival in Nigeria. She is the 2023 winner of the Abebi Award for Afro-nonfiction.
Immaculata was a 2022 West African Writer-in-Residence at LOATAD in Accra, Ghana and a participant in the 2023 New York Portfolio Review. She runs a studio in Enugu, Nigeria.
Longer:
Immaculata Abba is a researcher, cultural producer, and artist.
As a researcher, she undertakes commissioned research projects on how things get made in Africa and how Africans make sense of the world. Her work uncovers the cultural and structural bottlenecks constraining latent potential in Africa, from labour valuation and material sourcing to historical economic patterns.
Her academic research in History, Literature and Cultural Theory has covered: the tyranny of coloniality; the socio-economic impact of the 1890 Anti-Slavery Convention in colonial Southern Nigeria (1890–1940); economic nationalism and masculinity in colonial Nigeria; the informal economy and economic sovereignty in West Africa; and the economic lives and thought of Kumasi market women (1970-1995). She got her Bachelor’s from Queen Mary University of London and her Master’s from the University of Oxford.
As a cultural producer, she is the director of Studio Styles, a project space committed to fostering meaning-making, social healing, and historical reflection. One of its projects is Sweet Medicine (2024), a public humanities initiative on social healing in Nigeria through research and practice in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It was seeded by an Open Society Foundations’s Ideas Workshop fellowship.
As an artist, her primary practices are film, writing, and photography. Her short film 'You Matter to Me' (2022), a meditation on joy and community among middle-aged Igbo Nigerians, debuted at the Film Africa (UK) festival and has been screened at the Enugu International Film Festival (Nigeria), LACMA (USA), Jameel Art Centre (UAE), the 27th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (Switzerland), and more. She won the inaugural Rising Star award at the S16 Film Festival in 2023 and is currently working on her second short film–a product of the Goethe-Institut Nigeria’s post-Memory, post-Archive (2024) workshop.
Between 2021 and 2023, she worked full-time as a journalist and writer exploring how Nigerians make a living, find belonging, and create meaning and healing in their lives. Her articles and essays on Africapitalism, labour, housing, energy, music, art, architecture, ecology, and spirituality have been published in over 60 national and international outlets. She was a 2022 West African Writer-in-Residence at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora. She also won the 2023 Abebi Award in Afro-nonfiction for her essay on life after losing her brother in the 2005 Sosoliso plane crash.
From 2020 to 2023, she ran ‘Dusty Hill Drive’, a documentary project on architecture and the built environment in South-East Nigeria. Her photography and writing on architecture have been published in Tender Photo, GIDA Journal, DOCOMOMO International and The Architectural Review. She was a participant in the 2023 New York Portfolio Review and runs a studio in Enugu.
Informally:
I like peace and quiet. I love exploring food; I love enjoying food.
My favourite place in the world is any bedroom I can call mine. My favourite moment is every time before I fall asleep. My favourite thing to do is work. Music. I am happy, excited even, to be alive in this world, and I am really grateful for that and many more things. I value integrity and revel in details. And in colours. I look forward to making music and playing with wood and fabric more seriously.
Also, I like making meaning and sense of things, Nigerian life especially. To do this, I need a thriving knowledge infrastructure here. And so I’m spending most of my time figuring out how to build what things (e.g. libraries, cultural centres, structured finance) to make the industry work for its practitioners like me and work for Nigeria as a whole. The Sweet Medicine podcast is where I discuss this problem and potential solutions with other Nigerian humanities researchers. The podcast was a process of defining my work and saying hey, on this rock, I will build my church.
Beyond Nigerian life in particular, I just really like finding out how things are made, where things are, and how things work—and being as precise as I can be at it. Not because I’m trying to get somewhere but because journeying is fun.
I love working on things I’m passionate about, so much so that not doing so feels like I am failing God. I enjoy feeling feelings, defining the world for myself, and participating in this wonderful gift of life.
My favourite place in the world is any bedroom I can call mine. My favourite moment is every time before I fall asleep. My favourite thing to do is work. Music. I am happy, excited even, to be alive in this world, and I am really grateful for that and many more things. I value integrity and revel in details. And in colours. I look forward to making music and playing with wood and fabric more seriously.
Also, I like making meaning and sense of things, Nigerian life especially. To do this, I need a thriving knowledge infrastructure here. And so I’m spending most of my time figuring out how to build what things (e.g. libraries, cultural centres, structured finance) to make the industry work for its practitioners like me and work for Nigeria as a whole. The Sweet Medicine podcast is where I discuss this problem and potential solutions with other Nigerian humanities researchers. The podcast was a process of defining my work and saying hey, on this rock, I will build my church.
Beyond Nigerian life in particular, I just really like finding out how things are made, where things are, and how things work—and being as precise as I can be at it. Not because I’m trying to get somewhere but because journeying is fun.
I love working on things I’m passionate about, so much so that not doing so feels like I am failing God. I enjoy feeling feelings, defining the world for myself, and participating in this wonderful gift of life.
Unless otherwise stated, all images and writing on this website were made by Immaculata Abba.
Copyright: Immaculata Abba (2017 - 2025)