Welcome to Studio Styles.

I ideated this space in December 2019 when, as a graduate student, I felt disconnected from my university program’s compass, which pointed away from Africa. I found it difficult to find/access the material I needed to ask about Nigeria, the kinds of questions my UK education had trained me to ask—and that I enjoyed asking to no end—about Europe & the USA. This posed an existential crisis for me because I’m built to ask questions.

And so I returned to Nigeria with the question: How are Nigerians making a living, finding belonging and making meaning of the worlds within and around us—our work, our cultures, our ideas?

I made a freelance writing, research and art career out of it, using Studio Styles as my workshop for tinkering with ideas and prototypes. After five years, I have come to the end of the question. It has done its work, fissioning into other phrases—same spirit, different shapes:

• cultural advocacy (#CulturePays)

• research for social healing (Sweet Medicine)

• collective & personal reflection (Restful)

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*This space is named after the photographer Styles, in the play Sizwe Bansi is Dead, who used his studio to enact the dreams and aspirations of his Black community under apartheid South Africa. I saw the play in 2011 as a secondary school student in Abuja, and I carry its spirit—storytelling work as a matter of life and death—with me everywhere.

- Immaculata (immaculataabba.com)

May 2025