Studio Nkisi’s mission is to reindigenize technology through reparative architecture(s).

Led by Neema Githere Sïphone in ever-deepening co-creation with(in) the #digitaldiaspora, Studio Nkisi specializes in durational collaborations that defy the myth of sole authorship.

Studio Nkisi is a relational architecture practice that produces discursive programs, cyber-cartographies, large-scale installative shelters, research pilgrimages and curatorial interventions designed in the spirit of Afropresentism.

Render with Us

  • Pan African Solidarity School, Technologies of Relation (Nairobi)

  • Data Healing Recovery Clinic, MASS MoCA (Feb 2026-July 2027)

  • "NKISI NET”at MASS MoCA (on view Feb 2026 - July 2027) Photo: Kaelan Burkett courtesy of MASS MoCA.

  • Space10: On Reindigenizing Technology

  • BlackStar Film Festival 2024 (Philadelphia, PA)

  • Feminist Tech Principles, Visions & Card Deck (2021)

  • By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road, tm26 (Berlin)

Meet the Team

  • Catherine A. Lie

    Domestic + Spatial Architect

    (M.Arch, MIT)

  • Neema Githere Sïphone

    Theory + Relational Architect

    (Yale College, African Studies + Art History, 2014-17)

  • Jess Rowley

    Sound + Research Architect

    (MA, Material Futures, Central Saint Martins)

ABOUT OUR WORK

Discursive Programs

01

Cyber-Cartographies

02

Socio-Spatial Interventions

03

Curatorial Work & Film Programming

04

Large-Scale Installative and Structural Shelters

05

transmediale 2026 •Nkisi Netting Groups:

Papua New Guinea

At the heart – and moving through the undercurrents – of the relational, process-based approach to the 2026 transmediale festival (co-curated by Neema Githere Sïphone and Juan Pablo García Sossa) were the Nkisi Netting Groups: a series of gatherings co-hosted with regional partners and coordinated by local curriculum designers (LCDs), focusing on lateral exchange across community networks around the imaginative coordinates By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road.

Attuned to situated endemic knowledges, and the techno-political imaginations that arise from specific climatic, cultural, and infrastructural conditions, each Nkisi Netting Group brought together artists and technologists from diverse disciplines. Through co-designed activations and workshops, elastic mobile infrastructures, and hyperlocal techno-rituals, the gatherings braided pluriversal perspectives on computing, archiving, storytelling, and worlding – foregrounding situated forms of life and technologies that cultivate ways of living beyond extraction, acceleration, and global homogenization.

THE KISII-KUNDIAWA BRIDGE • Afropresentist Technologies for Finding Your Way Home • Directed by Neema Sïphone in ever-unfolding call-and-response* with kin+comrades • An Afropresentist technofossil experimenting with recursive*, durationally-(re)developing* film • Shot, styled, produced & creative directed improvisationally* on location, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea as part of the inaugural Nkisi Research•Netting Group for transmediale 2026.