General Info:
Immaculata Abba is a cultural producer, researcher, and artist working at the intersection of knowledge production, social infrastructure and economic thought. She has built globally recognised projects in the arts and humanities—from publishing to film to policy-oriented research—exploring the material conditions that enable intellectual and creative labor and how people claim space for thought, connection and joy.
She is the director of Studio Styles, through which she turns research-driven insights into tangible, everyday tools—books, data, films, music, and objects—that deepen our collective capacity for meaning-making, social healing, and historical reflection. She is the podcast host and producer of Sweet Medicine (2024), a public humanities project on social healing in Nigeria through research and practice in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Sweet Medicine was funded and developed through an Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop fellowship.
Her short film 'You Matter to Me' (2022) about 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), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -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.
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 of the 2023 New York Portfolio Review.
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. This resulted in articles and essays on Africapitalism, labour, housing, energy, indie music, art, architecture, ecology, and spirituality 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.
She has degrees in History and Comparative Literature from the universities of London and Oxford, where she wrote dissertations on: the tyranny of coloniality; the socio-economic impact of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Convention Act of 1890 in colonial Southern Nigeria (1890–1940); and the economic lives and thought of Kumasi market women (1970-1995).
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 this is a relatively new thing. 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 thriving knowledge economies here. And so I’m spending most of my time figuring out how to build infrastructure (e.g. libraries, cultural centres, structured finance) to make the industry work for its practitioners like me and work for Nigeria. Sweet Medicine is the project where I discuss this problem and potential solutions with other Nigerian humanities researchers. The podcast–those conversations–was a process of defining my work and saying hey, on this rock, I will build my church. I love working on things I’m passionate about, so much so that not doing so feels like I am failing God.
I spend a lot of time thinking (even though it often feels quite clueless/useless/ocean-mopping) about poverty-related suffering and what alleviation from it means/could look like. 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 this is a relatively new thing. 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 thriving knowledge economies here. And so I’m spending most of my time figuring out how to build infrastructure (e.g. libraries, cultural centres, structured finance) to make the industry work for its practitioners like me and work for Nigeria. Sweet Medicine is the project where I discuss this problem and potential solutions with other Nigerian humanities researchers. The podcast–those conversations–was a process of defining my work and saying hey, on this rock, I will build my church. I love working on things I’m passionate about, so much so that not doing so feels like I am failing God.
I spend a lot of time thinking (even though it often feels quite clueless/useless/ocean-mopping) about poverty-related suffering and what alleviation from it means/could look like. 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)