General Info:
Immaculata Abba is a Nigerian artist, writer, and researcher.
She uses her project space, Studio Styles, to ask, ‘How can we form deeper connections with ourselves, communities, histories, and environment?’ and facilitates these connections through editorial and research projects. She is the host and producer of the Sweet Medicine podcast, funded through an Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop fellowship.
Her short film 'You Matter to Me' (2022) 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 freelance journalist and writer guided by the question: How are Nigerians making a living, finding belonging, and creating meaning/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 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, and was a 2022 West African Writer-in-Residence at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora. She is an advocate for the Humanities.
Informally:
I like peace and quiet. I love exploring food; I love enjoying food.
My favourite place in the world is any bedroom that 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 much more. Colours. I look forward to making music and playing with wood and fabric more seriously.
Also, I like making meaning and sense of things. I love working on things I’m passionate about so much so that being separated from that 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 and participating in this wonderful gift of life.
My favourite place in the world is any bedroom that 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 much more. Colours. I look forward to making music and playing with wood and fabric more seriously.
Also, I like making meaning and sense of things. I love working on things I’m passionate about so much so that being separated from that 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 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)